We're about a month away from the street date for the Nintendo Switch 2, but someone already managed to secure the motherboard inside the upcoming console. YouTuber Geekerwan purchased a secondhand motherboard from what they describe as "Chinese eBay," and after confirming some details hidden within the PCB, found that it was a proper Nintendo Switch 2 board. The YouTuber was able to do a full breakdown and hardware analysis of the board, providing the technical details on the Switch 2 that Nintendo has yet to reveal.

Technical details for the Nintendo Switch 2 finally break cover

The Ampere-based SoC is definitely unique

The board Geekerwan was able to get ahold of has all the core hardware for the Switch 2 in tact. It features 12GB of LPDDR5X memory running at 8533MT/s and split across two memory dies, along with a MediaTek MT3681AEN for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Of course, the interesting bit of kit is the Nvidia SoC on the board. It clocks in at 207mm squared, which is almost double the size of the Tegra X1 SoC featured in the original model. The chip itself reveals the T239 name, as well, which has been the rumored chip for the Nintendo Switch 2 for close to four years.

Geekerwan was able to map out a die shot of the chip, showing eight A78C CPU cores crammed next to a massive Ampere-based GPU. The Ampere GPU carries the same architecture as Nvidia's RTX 30-series graphics cards, and the die shot shows 12 SMs, which would total 1,536 CUDA cores. For context, that's a little more than half of the cores available in a desktop RTX 3050 graphics card. Geekerwan insists that the closest point of comparison for the Switch 2's SoC is a downclocked RTX 2050 laptop GPU.

The YouTuber extrapolated out simulated performance based on the hardware, and found that the Switch 2 should perform about as well as a Steam Deck in handheld mode while reaching the performance of a GTX 1050 Ti in docked mode. That's impressive performance considering the size of the Switch 2. Nvidia has already confirmed that the console will support DLSS, so a lot of its performance will likely come from the AI-assisted upscaling.

In addition to these one-to-one benchmarks, Geekerwan tried to create some examples of what games could look like running on the Switch 2 hardware. You can see examples in the video above, but one of the more impressive feats is Black Myth: Wukong running at a playable frame rate. It won't be long until we see the Switch 2 properly in action. The console is set to launch on June 5 globally.