A possible prototype Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti cooler design has been spotted, showing an extraordinary quad-slot configuration with the cooler sitting on top of a horizontally-oriented PCB. Possibly also destined for a new Ada architecture-based Nvidia GeForce RTX Titan Ada card, the gaming GPU cooler is one of the largest we’ve ever seen.
Shared by Twitter user @ExperteVallah, they declare the images to possibly show a new RTX Titan card. However, another Twitter source points out the presence of an RTX 4090 label on the faceplate of the cooler.
What’s more, these images have been seen before and associated with the RTX 4090 before it launched, suggesting this is perhaps an old prototype cooler that didn’t make the grade for some reason. However, it’s also possible the cooler was simply deemed not necessary for those previous cards but might still be required for new, even more powerful models.
Whether they use this new cooler or not, it would be right in terms of timing for a new RTX Titan or RTX 4090 Ti to arrive later this year, with the RTX 4090 – Nvidia‘s current most powerful consumer card – having launched in October 2022. Meanwhile, it’s five years since the last Titan card, the Titan RTX.
Looking more closely at the cooler, there are several things that are notable about it. The first is obviously the quad-slot design, which inherently means this card is going to be very limited in terms of which cases it fits into, even with the card mounted vertically. However, while a quad-slot design may seem ludicrous, it wouldn’t be the first card to be this large – several board partner cards over the years have stretched this far, such as the Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 Master that has a 3.5 slot design.
What is unique though, to our knowledge, is that the cooler is designed to sit on top of a very narrow PCB that’s mounted to the bottom of the cooler, parallel to the motherboard (assuming the card is mounted directly into a motherboard PCIe slot). The GPU plate can be seen on the bottom edge of the cooler with the entire rest of the cooler’s structure being dedicated to cooling fins and fans, rather than making space for a PCB.
Because of this horizontal layout, the I/O plate of the cooler has the three DisplayPorts and a single HDMI port stacked on top of each other, with each port aligning with one of the four PCIe slots. Oddly, though, this view also shows the design makes little use of the I/O area to exhaust heat from the card, with only the two inner PCIe slots aligning with the small rectangular exhaust opening.
Whatever the origins of this colossal card cooler, we’d certainly be interested in seeing a card use it, whether it ends up being an Ada RTX Titan, an RTX 4090 Ti, or some other future card. Just the horizontal GPU configuration is interesting enough for modding potential and such a card would also surely leap straight to the top of our best graphics card list, for sheer performance if not value for money.
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