Pour one out for EVGA graphics cards. Back in September 2022, the company announced it would make no more, bringing to a close a run of rather performant and well-cooled GPUs, many of which were capable of some serious overclocking.
One of the figures behind some of those super-tweakable designs was Vince "Kingpin" Lucido, an extreme overclocker known for his all-black design ethos and his work with EVGA (via Videocardz). After EVGA's exit, however, Lucido did seem like he was open to offers from other vendors.
Now that period is over, after exploring collaborations with some other big-name companies he's now working with PNY on some of its latest designs.
Gamers Nexus' Steve Burke got the chance to take a tour of the lab Lucido calls "Kingpin studios" in Taipei, a futuristic building that looks like a gigantic workshop of PC gaming dreams. In amongst his impressive array of hardware (and some fancy-looking electric bikes), Lucido explains why he chose to work with PNY over others.
"They're keen to dive into extreme overclocking. Asus, MSI, Galax, the other companies, they already do it. Too many cooks in the kitchen, right?"
"There's a huge hole right now in the enthusiast market from EVGA being gone, and it doesn't really seem like the other vendors are too keen to fill it"
That's not too surprising, I suppose. While overclocking used to be practically mainstream, it's been a while since we've seen an OC'ed card that delivers much more than a couple of percent performance improvement over a standard model.
What with GPUs being able to effectively boost themselves to high-levels with relatively standard coolers, performance gains in recent years don't really seem to make the extra expense of an overclocked card worth it for most.
If anyone's capable of putting together a card with a real performance advantage though, it's probably Lucido. And given some predicted upcoming GPU launches (I'm looking at you, Nvidia), perhaps he may have had the chance to get his hands on something next-generation?
"I heard, y'know, the vendors...maybe this year, there's a new card coming" Lucido says, coyly.
"I spoke with several of the board partners, and they're all like, 5080, end of year" says Steve. "Definitely", Lucido replies, with a nod.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
Definitely, that's what they're saying, or definitely, as in "that's correct", who's to say. Anyway, whether it's working on the upcoming GPUs or merely tinkering with the current models (and I know where my money would be), Lucido certainly seems busy testing out new GPU overclocking software. Although as he points out, in his signature style, the first thing he did with his PNY RTX 4090 was turn off the RGB.
Matte black and highly overclocked GPUs, cooked up in an honest-to-goodness secret laboratory? Living the dream right there. A little RGB is fine though, right? Me, I like a little dash of red. Horses for courses, I suppose.
