A handful of official product shots for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition have leaked, giving us a good look at what is presumably green team’s final Ampere-based flagship graphics card for gamers. As teased by Jeff Fisher during CES 2022, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition looks largely identical to its standard sibling, with one of the few notable differences being the inclusion of the new 16-pin PCIe Gen 5 power connector.
Photos for a couple of custom GeForce RTX 3090 Ti models have also leaked. They include the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 ULTRA from EVGA and three models from COLORFUL, which comprise the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti BattleAx Deluxe, GeForce RTX 3090 Ti iGame Vulcan OC, and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti iGame Neptune OC. EVGA’s option is notable for having its PCIe Gen 5 power connector on the tail end of the card rather than the side, while COLORFUL’s iGame Neptune OC is a liquid-cooled model that might be of interest to those who think GPUs are getting too thick.
Early performance estimates of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti comes by way of CapFrameX, which tweeted some numbers teasing how the new flagship might compare to its standard sibling. The team behind the capture and analysis tool claims that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is only 10% faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 in 4K performance at best. The card is also said to feature a boost clock of 2 GHz and TDP of 450 watts.
Some performance numbers RTX 3090 vs RTX 3090 Ti, first impression!
— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) March 25, 2022
▶️ Ti ~10% faster at 4K
▶️ 450W power
▶️ 2GHz boost@BauduinSven @3DCenter_org @VideoCardz
Last but not least is a potential leak of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti’s pricing. According to MEGAsizeGPU, the graphics card will cost the same as the GeForce RTX 3090, which would give it an MSRP of $1,499. Perhaps the GeForce RTX 3090 might be getting a price cut.
Cuz it’s only 5% faster than a 3090(450W TGP)
— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) March 26, 2022
GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition is NVIDIA’s first graphics card with 16-pin power connector (VideoCardz)
According to some initial reports, the card just 5% to 10% faster than GeForce RTX 3090 at 4K resolution. There are memory-intenstive games that will see higher gains from the 21 Gbps GDDR6X upgrade, but overall the reviewers that we spoke with are not impressed with its performance.
Some custom designs, that will be unveiled on March 29, will have a TDP even higher than 450W. For instance, the ASUS ROG STRIX OC will ship with 480W TDP and still be adjustable up to 516W. Here, it is worth reminding that the maximum power that can be fed through the new PCIe Gen5 power connector and the PCIe slot itself is 525W.
As for the price, there are still some conflicting reports. The rumors about pricing that surfaced in the last 24 hours have mentioned $1,499, $1,999 or even 2,399 USD MSRP (that includes Founders Edition).