After months of waiting, leaked photos and specs for GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AIB partner cards have finally surfaced online, starting with the upcoming MSI RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X. As reported by Videocardz, this RTX 3090 Ti SKU includes the brand-new 16-pin supplementary power connector (part of the PCIe 5.0 spec) and a monstrous 480W TDP which is the highest power rating we've ever seen on a GeForce card.
As a result of the insane power headroom available to this card, the 3090 Ti Suprim X features a much thicker heatsink than its RTX 3090 counterpart. This has turned the RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X into a 3.5 slot card and will require a case with more than four PCIe slots available if you want the card to run cool.
Aesthetically, the card still looks the same as its other siblings, such as the RTX 3090 Suprim X and RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X. However, the additional mass of the heatsink will make the RTX 3090 Ti version stand out as a much more chunky GPU in your system.
Clock speeds for the RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X peak at 1950MHz out of the box, with a 1965MHz option available to the end-user if they enable it in the MSI Center app. The TDP of the Suprim X is reportedly going to be 480W and could be higher if MSI allows that power target to be increased in overclocking software.
The RTX 3090 Ti Suprim has the all-new 16 pin power connector that has just begun to make its way into power supplies this year. The new, more capable power connector is rated for a maximum output of 600W. This should be more than enough for the RTX 3090 Ti's 480W TDP.
Surprisingly, another new feature coming to the RTX 3090 Ti is the introduction of PCIe Gen 5.0 power connector. The move is a bit strange considering Nvidia is doing this with its 30 series GPUs that have always run on Gen 4.0. (Update: We incorrectly stated that Nvidia would be moving to a PCIe 5.0 interface. It is still 4.0 on the slot, but the 16-pin power connector is part of the 5.0 spec.)
The move to Gen 5.0 could have been out of necessity more than anything else, and with the 3090 Ti's incredibly high TDP, the 16-pin power connector is almost a requirement for anything in the 450W ballpark or greater. Nvidia's proprietary 12-pin connector used on the earlier RTX 30 series cards could have still worked, but moving to the industry standard connection is a better long-term plan.
For the uninitiated, rumored specifications for the new RTX 3090 Ti include a fully enabled GA102 die with 10,752 CUDA cores, and an upgraded memory system to the new 2GB GDDR6X ICs, running at 21Gbps. This change will cut the RTX 3090 Ti's memory chip count in half (from 24 to 12) and improve the GPU's memory bandwidth to over 1TBps.
TDP for the reference spec is rumored to be 450W TDP, so the 480W TDP on the Suprim X model is not surprising. We are not completely sure why Nvidia needed to give the RTX 3090 TI 100W more power than the RTX 3090, but the higher specced G6X memory could have something to do with it.
After numerous delays for the 3090 Ti SKU, reports indicate that the GPU will finally launch on March 29th. So get your wallets ready if you want to buy the world's most power-hungry GPU.
