Chinese GPU vendor Zephyr has cancelled its single-fan RTX 4070 Ti Super due to VRAM price hikes — memory shortage is forcing a pivot to an SFF RTX 4070 Super instead

Earlier this year, Chinese GPU manufacturer Zephyr unveiled the world's first single-fan RTX 4070 Ti Super that ran at the full board power without compromising on thermals. It was an ITX dream for many small form factor (SFF) PC enthusiasts, and Zephyr seemed really committed, even publicly testing different heatsink materials. Unfortunately, the project has now been canned due to the ongoing memory crisis.

Posting on Bilibili, the company revealed that a "significant increase in VRAM costs" has forced it to cancel development on the GPU. The statement also mentions "industry order demands," implying AI clients have forced smaller businesses like Zephyr to resort to leftovers, which are overpriced anyway. Previously, we even saw rumors of Nvidia no longer selling VRAM bundled with its GPUs to board partners.

UNIKO's Hardware, who first reported on this, said that 2 GB GDDR6X chips used to cost roughly $7.25 in China "before the AI boom," but those prices have risen to almost $30 per chip now. Regardless of the number crunching, it's common knowledge that memory around the world has gotten significantly more expensive, even if prices are plateauing as of late. You can see the report by expanding the tweet below.

Zephyr says that it will now switch to a single-fan RTX 4070 Super instead in order to work around the steep prices. As a reminder, the 4070 Super features 12 GB of GDDR6X memory saturated across a 192-bit bus, resulting in 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. In comparison, the RTX 4070 Ti Super has 16 GB of GDDR6X on a 256-bit wide interface that takes the memory bandwidth to 672.3 GB/s.

Aside from VRAM cost-cutting, the power requirements also become more lenient on the 4070 Super, as it has only a 220W TGP instead of the 280W that the 4070 Ti Super operates at. Zephyr already showed that its cooler can keep even the higher TGP under control, so perhaps we could see OC specs on its 4070 Super. Previously, the CNC-milled RTX 4070 that the company produced stuck to Nvidia's stock clock speeds.

Lastly, at the end of the statement, Zephyr opened up the possibility for an insane single-fan RTX 5070 Ti — keeping that GPU cool in such a small space would be a true feat of engineering. The vendor warns that the card will be expensive, as expected, and there's no guarantee of it coming out yet. The card's development is predicated on supply chain analysis and further market research.

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