NVIDIA’s Monstrous Quad-Slot GPU Cooler Spotted Once Again

NVIDIA’s Monstrous Quad-Slot GPU Cooler Spotted Once Again

We know that NVIDIA’s monstrously-sized RTX 4090 Ti / TITAN RTX “Ada” exists somewhere as the photos has been leaked before, aside from just renders. It has leaked once again, and this time it ended up in a Chinese second-hand marketplace called Goofish (闲鱼). How did this prototype hardware ended up in a marketplace is pretty much anyone’s guess – but these new set of photos do reveal a few more tidbits on what could’ve been NVIDIA’s ultimate trump card against potential competition from Team Red.

As seen on the images (as well as previous leaks), the PCB is indeed sitting sideways (parallel to the motherboard) with the I/O lined up vertically instead of the conventional horizontal layout. The coolers themselves are also rotated with a layout similar to a CPU cooler as the die would’ve been sitting in the same plane as the motherboard itself. From the outside though, it doesn’t look that much different than a conventional RTX 40 GPU with the flow-through fans seen in two generation of GPUs by now.

One question that remained is exactly what GPU or silicon this cooler is for. Many conflicting reports point to this cooler belonging to the TITAN RTX “Ada” GPU that can guzzle as much as 800 watts, while others are pointing to a 600W version of RTX 4090 which would’ve been appropriately coming with a ‘Ti’ suffix. However the photo itself shown that the GPU frame is indeed labeling it as “RTX 4090”, leaving questions on whether this cooler may have been just a prototype for the 450W card.

The latter theory is plausible, though. Almost all RTX 4090 coolers on the market today are very much oversized and overbuilt despite a ridiculously high 450-watt TGP target, as there were rumors that RTX 4090 was originally designed with 600W TGP in mind. NVIDIA may have abandoned such design as they were moving with a relatively efficient 450W power target and likely saved some development costs in the process without needing to design such unconventional layout to cool the card at the power draw it’s asking for. (A leaker has pointed out that this is in fact a “test board” for RTX 4090.)

Source: Videocardz | VallahExperte | Hassan Mujtaba

Pokdepinion: Regardless of what card this could’ve been, it’s very much a collector’s item at this point. Assuming NVIDIA didn’t choose to hunt down the leaked hardware, of course.