Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti GPU leak suggests eye-watering power demands
MSI RTX 3090 Ti leaked spec recommends a 1,000W PSU
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Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Tiwill hopefully arrive shortly, and purported specs for anMSIversion have been leaked which include a major revelation on the power consumption front.
In fairness, we knew the RTX 3090 Ti would demand a great deal of wattage – the vanilla3090already does, after all – but now we know, assuming this leak from @wxnod on Twitter is correct (exercise the usual caution), that MSI’s Suprim X 3090 Ti card could consume 480W (compared to 430W for MSI’s existing Suprim X 3090).
It’s horrible pic.twitter.com/RLktG7MELQJanuary 13, 2022
The real eye-opener comes in the form of thePSUthat MSI recommends in the leaked spec, which is a 1,000W power supply (compared to an 850W unit for the standard RTX 3090). Yes, a full thousand watts – ouch indeed.
The MSI Suprim X 3090 Ti will supposedly offer a base clock of 1,560MHz, with boost to 1,860MHz, and a further ‘Extreme Mode’ that pushes to 1,900MHz. The CUDA core count is 10,752, by the way, as has beenrumoredfor a while now.
As we mentioned at the outset, the hope is that we’ll see the new 3090 Tigraphics cardin late January. Speculation holds that the release date is January 27, but then again, the grapevine also recently claimedNvidia has run into production hiccupsthat could mean the GPU’s launch is delayed.
Analysis: Hinting at PSU worries for next-gen graphics cards?
How many people have a 1,000W power supply in their PC? Not many, that’s for sure, and that includes us. Of course, not many people will be looking at buyingNvidia’s absolutely top-end graphics card, either. Certainly not given the rumored price tag which could cause more jaws to drop than this purported power requirement, again if therumor mill is right on pricing.
Of more concern to the average computer owner out there is the broader issue of GPUs pushing harder still with PSU demands, and the sighting of cards like the 3090 Ti making it easier to believe that next-gen products could actually turn out as the grapevine suggests – to be incredibly power-hungry.
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We’ve heard tales of Nvidia’s next-gen ‘Lovelace’ GPUs maybe doubling power requirements,which could mean looking at 600W levels, and this kind of driving forward with wattage at the highest level with Ampere makes that seem perhaps not as unrealistic as it did when we first heard the speculation. (AMD is also rumoredto be upping power consumption considerably for next-gen, too, by the way).
The problem for many users could then be if next-gen mid-range demands are also somewhat spiked, then systems with little wattage headroom due to a more modest power supply could be looking at a possible PSU upgrade if switching to a new Lovelace graphics card. And changing power supply not only adds to the overall expense of a GPU upgrade (as if that wasn’t bad enough these days), but also complicates the actual upgrade process considerably.
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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