It appears Kingpin is back, and if his new collaboration with ASUS bears fruit, he plans to bring back custom Kingpin-designed GPUs. Kingpin's historic nine-year tenure at EVGA ended in 2022 when EVGA shut down its GPU division, seemingly ending a career that had gone from garage overclocking to deep collaboration on cutting-edge GPU design.
Fast forward to today, and things are very different. While a collaboration on a new Kingpin GPU with PNY never materialized, he is still doing the overclocking he loves and launched a new YouTube channel (Overclock Kingpin) to focus on his craft. Not only will he be collaborating with ASUS on future DIY PC YouTube content, but he's already testing plenty of high-end hardware by both ASUS and Corsair to get him started. But what of a potential ASUS ROG Kingpin GPU?
For now, nothing, though Kingpin emphasizes that making it happen is a high priority, thus his focus on strengthening his relationship with ASUS. Interestingly unlike EVGA, ASUS has no NVIDIA exclusivity requirements, so if they do collab on a GPU, we may see something like an ASUS ROG Kingpin AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT.
But then, Kingpin may not be interested in anything but the ultra high-end and breaking benchmark records, which would currently mean a GeForce RTX 5090. A custom ASUS ROG Kingpin NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 would seem likely at this point in time, and something similar already fell through with PNY.
The full announcement video from Kingpin on his new Overclock Kingpin YouTube channel is definitely worth a watch.
One interesting highlight was how Kingpin described his relationship with personal friend and fellow overclocker Shamino, who beat him into the door at EVGA and eventually wound up competing with him at ASUS after Kingpin rose up to take his place at EVGA. The two have obviously kept an amicable relationship over the years, and it's nice to see Kingpin still has friends in high places after the death of EVGA's GPU division. Hopefully, they get to work together on a great new graphics card soon.
Christopher Harper is a tech writer with over a decade of experience writing how-tos and news. Off work, he stays sharp with gym time & stylish action games.