Extreme overclocker Vince “Kingpin” Lucido is working with PNY on its GPUs and potentially next-gen Nvidia cards

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Pour one for EVGA graphics cards. In September 2022, the company announced that it would no longer produce any more, ending its lineup of rather productive and well-cooled GPUs, many of which were capable of stern overclocking.

One of the figures behind some of these super customizable designs was Vince “Kingpin” Lucido, an extreme overclocker known for his all-black design ethos and collaboration with EVGA (via Graphics Card). However, after EVGA’s departure, Lucido seemed open to offers from other suppliers.

Now that period is over, after partnering with several other well-known companies, he is currently working with PNY on some of his latest projects.

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Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus got such a chance take a tour of the lab Lucido calls the “Kingpin studios” in Taipei, a futuristic building that looks like a giant workshop of video game dreams. Among the impressive array of equipment (and some fancy-looking e-bikes), Lucido explains why he chose to work with PNY over others.

“They want to get into extreme overclocking. Asus, MSI, Galax and others are already doing this. Too many cooks in the kitchen, right?”

“There is currently a huge gap in the EVGA enthusiast market that is closing and it doesn’t seem like other vendors are very keen to fill it.”

I guess that’s not too surprising. While overclocking has pretty much been mainstream, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a card with an OC CPU that delivered much more than a few percent performance improvement over a stock model.

Given that GPUs are able to efficiently boost to high levels using relatively standard coolers, the performance gains in recent years don’t really seem to make the extra expense of an overclocked card worth it for most of them.

However, if anyone can put together a card with a real performance advantage, it’s probably Lucido. And with the expected upcoming GPU releases (I’m talking about you, Nvidia), perhaps he had a chance to get his hands on something next-gen?

“You know, I heard that retailers…maybe there will be a new card this year,” Lucido says shyly.

“I’ve talked to some of the management partners and they all say, 5080, end of year,” Steve says. “Definitely,” Lucido replies, nodding.

That’s definitely what they say, or definitely, as in “that’s true,” who that means. Either way, whether it’s working on upcoming GPUs or just tinkering with current models (and I know where my money will be), Lucido certainly seems busy testing up-to-date GPU overclocking software. Although, as he points out, in his typical style, the first thing he did with his PNY RTX 4090 was to turn off RGB.

Matte black and highly overclocked graphics processors prepared in a secret laboratory? Live your dreams right there. A little RGB will be fine though, right? I like a bit of red. Horses for courses, I guess.

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