ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Retail Box Smiles For The Camera
After seeing a purportedly unaltered photograph of an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card (shown above, click to enlarge), we are more convinced than ever that NVIDIA will be unveiling a new flagship SKU very soon. That's not to say we have any inside information (we don't) or that there's been an official confirmation (there hasn't been). But the leaks and rumors are piling up and becoming more convincing.
It's that old saying, 'Where there's smoke there's fire', and we sure are seeing a lot of smoke lately. Rumor has it NVIDIA will announce its new flagship consumer model next month at the Consumer Electronics Show. Past leaks have also suggested NVIDIA originally planned to unveil refreshed GeForce RTX 3080 and 3070 Ti graphics cards with more memory as well, but that both of those launches have supposedly been delayed.
So we'll have to wait and see what actually materializes next month. For now, the folks at ITHome got their mitts on a photo of a pair of custom GeForce RTX 3090 Ti models from ASUS. One of them is almost wholly visible in the picture, while the other one only has the corner of the box exposed, with "3090 Ti" clearly printed.
Of course, these could be convincing Photoshop jobs, which actually wouldn't be too difficult to accomplish even with minimal experience. Assuming it's real, though, one interesting tidbit is the "PCIe 4.0" stamp on the lower-left side of the packaging. This indicates the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will not be a PCIe 5.0 part, in case you were wondering. We're not expecting any PCIe 5.0 GPUs until Ada Lovelace (NVIDIA) and RDNA 3 (AMD) arrive anyway.
One other thing that's interesting is the slightly redesigned cooler. If our eyes aren't failing us, we count 11 blades in each of the three cooling fans, versus nine blades in each of the three fans on the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 (non-Ti). More cooling is perhaps needed, with rumors of the Ti variant being a power-hungry beast with a 450W TDP.
That could be in part to drive faster clocks speeds. Also, rumor has it the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will feature 10,752 CUDA cores (up from 10,496 in the non-Ti model) and 16GB of Micron's 21Gbps GDDR6X memory. If so, that could give the card around 1TB/s of memory bandwidth.
Finger's crossed the leaked photo is indeed real and that an announcement is coming.
