Alleged photos of the heat sink that NVIDIA will be using for the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti Founders Edition has leaked, offering a potential look at the cooling solution for green team’s next-generation, Lovelace-based flagship graphics card designed for gamers. Enthusiasts who really liked the design that NVIDIA came up with for the current Ampere generation will probably love this one, as it appears to be pretty much identical upon first glance, albeit with an increased fin arrangement and other upgrades. The photos also suggest that the GeForce RTX 4090 will stick with a dual-axial fan design, one that will be complemented by the now familiar hourglass-shaped skeleton/shroud. NVIDIA will reportedly launch its GeForce RTX 40 Series as early as July.
The part that’s most interesting is the heatsink itself. It looks like NVIDIA is now going to utilize a bigger baseplate that will not only cool the GPU but the memory dies too. Currently, NVIDIA uses thermal pads to dissipate heat from the memory dies to the heatsink on its RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti Founders Edition graphics cards.
This new heatsink layout will allow NVIDIA to cool at least twelve GDDR6X memory chips. It is likely that the same configuration as the RTX 3090 Ti’s PCB will be used here with 4 GDDR6 chips on the right/left side, three on the top, and 1 at the bottom. With NVIDIA expected to utilize higher-spec GDDR6X chips on its next-gen cards, the extra cooling will really be essential for the flagship AD102 parts. There’s also a large aluminum heat spreader for the VRMs and two thermal pads for various components. The heatsinks on the sides also seem to be upgraded from 23 fins to 24 fins on the leaked design.