NVIDIA will reimburse board partners for GeForce RTX 4080 12GB packaging

NVIDIA pays for RTX 4080 12GB boxes

At least two partners in the board confirmed this Gamers Nexus that NVIDIA is willing to pay to cancel the RTX 4080 12GB GPU, at least when it comes to packaging.

NVIDIA will work with board partners who have already made cases for the RTX 4080 12GB GPU to reimburse them for packaging costs. Such boxes will now have to be collected and destroyed. Those boxes cannot be used for the final product.

NVIDIA probably wants to forget the RTX 4080 12GB ever existed, so even a simple new name sticker won’t do the job. While the GPU manufacturer will reportedly pay for repacking (probably on the RTX 4070 Ti or 4070 series), it’s unclear if NVIDIA is willing to pay for other costs, such as labor, as well.

And the cost of labor is important. If some cards were already packaged and prepared for shipping, you’ll need to take them out of the box, re-stick them (let’s not forget that many cards have serial/production code stickers) and maybe even reflash them to a different BIOS. That last part might not be necessary, however, if NVIDIA decides not to change the specs. The SKU name will simply be changed in the driver, while the PCI device ID will remain the same.

Canceling the RTX 4080 12GB wasn’t the only time NVIDIA made such a last-minute change. A good example is the RTX 3080 Ti with 20GB of memory. Although NVIDIA had plans for such a model, with the necessary BIOS, it was later decided to launch this SKU with 12GB of memory.

However, months later some RTX 3080 Ti 20GB cards somehow did reappeared on the Russian market, confirming not only that the SKU is planned, but that the board partners have produced such cards. In this case, however, it would be much more expensive to change the specs because these cards had more memory installed physically. For the RTX 4080 12GB, we should expect only minor changes, if any.

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