A couple of weeks ago, rumours first began spreading, claiming that ASRock will be entering the graphics card market this year. This was particularly noteworthy at the time, as it is not every day that we see a new graphics card seller enter the market. Now, it appears that those rumours were in fact true, as ASRock has begun teasing its first GPU.
The previous report indicated that ASRock will be focussing on AMD graphics cards to start off with. At the time, I speculated that this could have something to do with ASRock's recent ambitions in the mining market, but the company's official teaser says otherwise, with ASRock's graphics card set to be branded with the ‘Phantom Gaming' name.
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発表までお楽しみに!#ASRock #PhantomGaming #PG#Phantom #Gaming #FAST #MYSTERIOUS #UNPREDICTABLE pic.twitter.com/BmUdns53pF— ASRock Japan (@AsrockJ) March 16, 2018
In the teaser video above, we get a rough idea of what to expect from ASRock's first graphics card. We still don't know exactly what GPU will be under the hood. While previous rumours indicated that ASRock will focus on AMD to start off with, it could also have an Nvidia graphics card up its sleeve.
All that the teaser does confirm is that ASRock is in fact releasing a graphics card that will be marketed towards gamers. It will use a dual-fan cooler design and have a single 8-pin PCIe power connector on top. With that information, we can rule out an RX Vega, which uses dual 8-pin connectors for power, or one of Nvidia's higher-end GTX 1080 or GTX 1080Ti GPUs, as these use an 8+6-pin PCIe power configuration.
Currently, we are expecting a formal announcement in April, so hopefully we'll learn more in the next few weeks.
KitGuru Says: ASRock's first graphics card launch appears to be confirmed at this point. Now we just need to sit back and wait for more news, which should arrive fairly soon.