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Nvidia’s RTX 4050 was spotted, or at least the packaging for the GPU was ostensibly seen, at a Galax event – although you might imagine, this is undoubtedly not what it seems, and we should be staggering under the weight of it. salt to be applied to this particular ‘leak’.
The sighting of a Galax RTX 4050 box came at an event where the graphics card maker launched its RTX 4090 models – the flagship is the only next-gen Lovelace GPU currently on sale – as reported by Wccftech (opens in new tab) (and first spotted on reddit (opens in new tab)).
And it’s led some people to get excited that maybe, just maybe, the RTX 4050 is somehow on the horizon. But we very much doubt it.
Of course, with leaks like this, there’s always the possibility that the photo is faked, but in this case it looks like it’s real – or at least the image, but not the box itself. By this we mean that this is most likely a Galax-made mock-up box to fill out the display stand at the launch event in the Philippines, or that seems like the most likely explanation anyway (if the photo isn’t a fake).
Analysis: none of this makes much sense
If you look closely there is some tape over the front of the box where it should read ‘RTX 4050’ to match the other visible logos, so in all likelihood this hasn’t been changed (and just pasted – it’s this element that makes it less likely that the photo is fake, at least for us).
But as mentioned, this is certainly not a sign that the RTX 4050 is imminent in any way and that graphics card makers are already producing packaging for it. It’s more likely that a Galax employee is being naughty – or it’s a mistake, pure and simple (somehow) – or the company is just filling its booth with other possible Lovelace products (although the reason the company doesn’t RTX 4080 box has used in that case a fair question).
Obviously, however, a true RTX 4050 box would certainly not be the same (huge) size as the hefty box needed to encase the RTX 4090’s flagship GPU. And so this is just as obviously an RTX 4090 box that the text has been tampered with (in real life, or by someone in Photoshop). VideoCardz (opens in new tab) further reports on this, claiming that by the way, it managed to get confirmation that the box in question was indeed present at this Galax launch event.
We haven’t heard anything about the RTX 4050 rumor mill at all, and if it were about to arrive, we would certainly have been getting bits of speculation down the vine by now. Indeed, we’ve heard very little about the RTX 4060 either, all of which suggests that a remotely wallet-friendly Lovelace GPU is still a long way off, and the RTX 4050 is very likely still a long way off.
Though some witty people have suggested that this could be the new incarnation and name for the RTX 4080 12GB, which was recently canceled (or “unlaunched,” ahem) by Nvidia after a negative response to that particular model. In all seriousness, presumably that 4080 variant is destined to become either the RTX 4070 or more likely the 4070 Ti (or Super), but however Nvidia goes with the renaming, it’s probably going to get messy (not for the first time).