Possible GeForce RTX 4090 Ti Cooler Spotted In The Wild And It's Monstrous
That is, there are definite leaks of real 600W Ada Lovelace GPUs, and there were even a couple of supposed benchmark leaks that came out for such a card. Of course, in the end, it happened that they were simply test boards built to find the limits of the AD102 silicon. NVIDIA likely wanted to know how far it could push the GeForce RTX 4090 in the quest to have the absolute fastest graphics card on the market in case AMD hit its goals with RDNA 3.
A hypothetical 600-watt graphics card would need an absolutely gigantic cooler, and that's exactly what we have pictures of today. Courtesy of @ExperteVallah on Twitter, we've got some new pictures of the bizarre four-slot cooler that was originally leaked on ChipHell back in January.
There's been an incredible amount of speculation concerning this cooler and exactly what it is supposed to be. It's a bizarre design—the GPU actually sits parallel to the motherboard, with this enormous cooler resting on top of it like a mezzanine design. Because of the card's orientation, the output cluster is actually horizontal across the four expansion slot backplate, which contains a sizable hole for exhaust.
These new pictures appear to be from the same person as the previous images, although this time around, the cooler is missing the actual GPU. There are telltale signs of this being a test product and not anything intended for actual sale, like the messy construction of the cooler—although it appears to have had a rough life since leaving NVIDIA's labs.
Amusingly, the cooler is labeled "RTX 4090", and it seems likely that at some point, this was intended to be the GeForce RTX 4090 before NVIDIA moved to the more traditional design that was ultimately released. So saying, it's fairly unlikely that this design will ever surface on a shipping product, which means that we aren't likely to see a hypothetical GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or "Titan Ada" come out using this cooler.
There are still rumblings of the original GeForce RTX 4090 Ti that kopite7kimi leaked, however. After all, the extant RTX 4090 is a considerably cut-down chip compared to the full-fat AD102. Such a card would have the full 144 shader modules enabled, giving it 18,432 CUDA cores and 96 MB of L2 cache. It was also rumored to use the fastest GDDR6 memory available, running at 24 Gbps. That would give it some 1,152 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
We have to expect that if NVIDIA does decide to release such a card as a victory lap this generation, it will definitely come in at no less than $2,000, and maybe as much as $2,500 or even $3,000. Better pull out the plastic for this one.
