Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is providing to be an elusive and expensive beast. First announced in passing during January’s CES keynote, further details were expected by the end of the month. That time came and went without official announcement, with most commentators believing supply-chain issues are the main culprit for delay.
We do know GeForce RTX 3090 Ti offers around 10 per cent more GPU horsepower than regular RTX 3090, availed through more shader cores and faster memory. Increasing the wick on each of these properties causes power consumption to spiral. Regular RTX 3090 arrives with a 350W TGP, rising to 400W or so for partner-overclocked cards. Rumour has it RTX 3090 Ti blows past these figures by using a 450W base rating that will rise to well over 500W for manufacturers with keenest overclocks.
Speculative pricing of this largely unannounced GPU is beginning to surface. MSI’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X 24G ought to be one of the better cards available, going by previous experiences, and early leaks suggested an on-shelf date of January 27. That’s not happened, of course, yet we do have an inkling of pricing by way of a listing at Japanese retailer Rakuten.
633,773 yen translates to around £4,050, which is about double the price of a regular RTX 3090. This eye-watering sum speaks to extremely limited upcoming supply coupled with an insatiable desire from some enthusiasts to have best-in-breed products, no matter how poor the relative value.
Though power is sure to exceed 500W for the overclocked card, MSI shies away from using the new 12-pin PCIe 5.0 connector, instead equipping with upcoming monster Suprim with three traditional 8-pin connectors already in evidence on the non-Ti card.
Our best guess is we’ll see limited RTX 3090 Ti supply seep through into the channel starting in March. Now, who has a spare £4,000 to lend me?
