What better way to start the week than with some juicy GPU gossip. Aptly named hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU has purportedly snagged a picture of Nvidia’s upcoming head honcho, the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti.
The card, a veritable four-slot beast, is hugely intriguing insofar as the display outputs are stacked one atop another. What could this mean? Well, cast your memory back and you might recall that Nvidia was rumoured to be using a vertical PCB arrangement for RTX 4090. That turned out not to be the case, but could it be that Team Green is resurrecting said cooler design for its latest-generation flagship?
We certainly wouldn’t rule out such possibility. The all-singing, all-dancing GPU will be productised as RTX 4090 Ti or RTX Titan, and may feature a full complement of 144 SMs, translating to a staggering 18,432 CUDA cores. Going all out, the card is rumoured to be imbued with a whopping 48GB of GDDR6X memory. Seeing as nothing comes close to RTX 4090 regular, a Ti or Titan variant would take the crown of the world’s fastest graphics card.
Despite the horsepower, it’s not the GPU that has us intrigued. Rather, it’s the prospect of Nvidia’s vertical cooling configuration making it to retail. In an unusual turn of events, the narrow PCB is intended to run across the bottom of the card, closest to the motherboard. Much like a traditional CPU cooler, this arrangement allows for a giant aluminium heatsink to sit atop, with air directed through the cooler and out the back.
Such a design naturally leads to a gargantuan footprint, yet by turning the GPU on its head, a four-slot arrangement makes a whole lot more sense. There’s a reason for it, and potential for improved cooling performance could be necessary as RTX 4090 Ti / Titan is said to carry a maximum board power of up to 800W, which is a 33 per cent hike over the 600W limit present on RTX 4090.
The full workings of such a layout aren’t entirely clear, and any such rumours should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the leaked contact plate does imply GPU, memory and VRM all sitting parallel to the motherboard. At the very least, we’d be fascinated to see a Founders Edition board that attempts something so bold.
Given RTX 4090’s existing supremacy, we wouldn’t expect to see a Ti variant to make an official debut until at least Q4 of this year. Eager enthusiasts should start saving irrespectively; if previous Titans are anything to go by, we’d expect an Ada Lovelace iteration to fetch at least $2,499.
