Nvidia's possible 4090 Titan prototype with 4-slot cooler disassembled
For years there were only photos of a supposed 4090 Ti, now the prototype has been disassembled and measured in the video. The giant cooler is very efficient.
The elongated PCB of the prototype without riser cable, bottom left the connections for displays.
(Image: Gamers Nexus , Screenshot: heise online)
The YouTube channel Gamers Nexus has managed to get its hands on a prototype graphics card from Nvidia that has been haunting the internet for years. Rumors of a possible "4090 Ti" or "4090 Titan" were already circulating around two years ago, mainly based on shipping documents or photos of the card. It is now certain that Nvidia has developed such a product quite far, but never brought it to market.
While Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus refers to the card as a "prototype" throughout, the design and workmanship of the very elaborate components are more indicative of a pre-series. The cooler, which takes up four slots in the width of the PC case, consists of many individual parts, cables for the power supply, LED lighting and a very short riser cable for the PCIe slot.
GPU parallel to the motherboard
This is necessary because the elongated PCB does not sit parallel to the cooler, as is the case with gaming graphics cards, but parallel to the motherboard. The PCB is therefore virtually attached to the bottom of the heat sink. This enables a flow-through design without the PCB being in the way of the airflow. It seems as if Nvidia has researched this idea with the prototype in order to make it ready for series production with far less material costs for the new RTX 5090. In this model, the PCB sits parallel to the cooler as usual, but is kept very small so that two fans on the left and right can blow air through the fins unhindered.
In the disassembled prototype, there are three fans, one of which sits invisibly in the middle of the cooler. The two large, externally mounted fans work in different directions, as was already the case with earlier Founders Editions from Nvidia. Nvidia has now also abandoned this concept with the 5090; with standard installation without riser cables for vertical mounting, the new graphics card directs the warm air towards the processor. In the prototype, the huge effort is worth it: even with a load of 600 watts – ex works, a 4090 can claim 450 watts – the GPU remained well below 70 watts and very quiet in sound measurements. The video does not mention weight and dimensions.
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Unknown GPU and BIOS
However, it is not possible to say exactly what you are looking at, as the labeling of the GPU (2221A1 and U8B034.000) is just as unknown for series products as the model number PG137 for the board. The latter only appeared two years ago in a report on shipping documents for a supposed 48 GB Ada generation Titan GPU. The model from Gamers Nexus only has the 24 GByte of an RTX 4090, and the usual software and benchmark values show it as such. However, the reported clock rates for the GPU are lower than those of production models, which is common for prototypes.
As the V-BIOS, i.e. the firmware of the graphics card, is also unknown for software, it is not possible to determine with certainty what kind of GPU is on the prototype. Due to the performance of the cooler, it is most likely that Nvidia wanted to test what it takes to quietly dissipate a power loss of 600 watts. Ultimately, however, the decision seems to have been made in favor of the aforementioned flow-through cooler for the upcoming 5090, which can dissipate up to 575 watts.
(nie)
