With NVIDIA's Turing architecture turning six this year, the company is retiring many of the remaining Turing products from its video card lineup. And today that spring-cleaning spirit is coming to the entry-level segment of NVIDIA's professional visualization lineup, where NVIDIA is introducing a pair of new desktop cards based on its low-end Ampere hardware.

The new RTX A1000 and RTX A400 cards will replace the T1000/T600/T400 lineup, which was released three years ago in 2021. The new cards will join the same entry-level category and eventually replace Proviz's RTX A series. cards, offered by NVIDIA. Ampere generation Professional graphics technologies in the lowest power, lowest performance, lowest cost configuration.

Especially, since the entry level was based on the T series. NVIDIA's feature-limited TU11x siliconwhich lacked ray tracing and tensor core support – the cornerstone of NVIDIA's RTX technologies and associated branding – marks the first time that these technologies will be available in NVIDIA's entry-level desktop provisioning cards. And accordingly, they're being promoted in RTX-branded video cards, eliminating the awkward overlap with NVIDIA's compute cards, which never carry RTX branding.

It goes without saying that as low-end cards go, neither part's ray-tracing performance is anything to write home about, but it does provide a consistent set of graphics features from top to bottom to NVIDIA's current Provision lineup. does.

Both the A1000 and A400 are based on the same board design, with NVIDIA this time eliminating any pretense of physical feature differentiation (the T400 was missing its 4^Th Mini DisplayPort). This means both cards are based on the GA107 GPU, sporting different core and memory configurations.

The RTX A1000 is a non-full configuration of the GA107, with 2304 CUDA cores and 72 tensor cores. This is paired with 8GB of GDDR6, running at 12Gbps, for a total memory bandwidth of 192GB/second. The card has a TDP of 50 watts, matching its predecessor.

Meanwhile the RTX A400 is much more stripped down, offering a third of the active hardware and half the memory bandwidth on the GPU itself. On paper this gives it around 40% of the performance of the T1000, and half the memory bandwidth – or 96GB/s. Notably, despite the hardware reduction, the official TDP is still 50 watts, versus its predecessor's 30 watts. So at this point NVIDIA will soon stop offering desktop-provision cards below 50 watts.

As mentioned earlier, both cards otherwise feature the same physical design, with a half-height half-length (HHHL) board with active cooling. As you would expect from such low TDP cards, these are single-slot cooler designs. Both cards have a quarter of the Mini DisplayPorts, with the same DP 1.4a functionality we've seen in all of NVIDIA's products over the past several years.

Finally, video-focused users may want to note that the A1000/A400 have slightly different video capabilities. While the A1000 has access to both NVDEC video decode blocks of the GA107, the A400 only has access to one block – another cutback to distinguish the two cards. Otherwise, both video cards have access to a single NVENC block of the GPU.

According to NVIDIA, the RTX A1000 will be available through its distributors starting today. Meanwhile the RTX A400 will hit distribution channels in May, and OEMs are expected to start offering the cards as part of their pre-built systems this summer.