A prototype RTX 40-series graphics card cooler was recently spotted online being offered up for a whopping $120K USD. The cooler in question is the same "RTX 4090"-stamped design that has been repeatedly reported as a "Ti" and "Ada Titan" Founders Edition design, boasting a massive quadruple slot cooler design that appears to be a prototype design. The cooler is conspicuously stamped with 'RTX 4090,' but rampant speculation is that this could be used for other designs. In either case, the seller is only offering the cooler portion of the card without the PCB attached.
The cooler is reportedly being auctioned off at a Chinese marketplace known as Goofish, by someone using the handle "Hayaka." The price is currently sitting at 888888 Yuan — which translates to just over $120K, but there is the possibility the price will go even higher if there are multiple willing buyers. The seller also showed off several pictures of the cooler in a Tweet, in an apparent move to confirm they have the actual product — and that it's not a fake.
😆😆😆 pic.twitter.com/DwSaCpAFHdJuly 3, 2023
According to previous rumors, this cooler is supposed to be designed for the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti and/or refreshed RTX Titan — based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. The biggest difference between this prototype cooler and the current RTX 40 series Founders Edition cards, is the cooler's massive width, taking up four PCIe slots. Due to this, the cooler is designed to handle 800W of thermal load and supposedly features a third fan hidden away inside the cooler's shroud.
In fact, the prototype's quad-slot width is so large, it also features a vertically installed PCB, which is something we've never seen before in a graphics card. This is probably why a third fan was required so that the components on the vertically stacked PCB get adequate cooling from the two external fans installed on the cooler.
We don't know if Nvidia will ever release an RTX 4090 Ti or RTX Titan, but there's certainly room for the trillion-dollar GPU company to do so. The current RTX 4090 only uses 87.5% of the cores AD102 has full access to, meaning a potential 4090 Ti/Titan could have 12.5% more cores than the 4090. If Nvidia needs more performance than what the cores provide by themselves, it could also increase clock speeds and power consumption to improve performance, as the quad-slot prototype would seemingly facilitate. Or this could merely be a shelved 4090 prototype cooler — only time will tell.
