1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

The Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti will have a triple 8-pin adapter

By

Nvidia’s latest flagship GPU — the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti — will have a third 8-pin adapter, according to Tom’s Hardware. We’ve known for a long time that the 3090 Ti would be power-thirsty, and now it’s clear how Nvidia intends for the card to draw its power.

It’s been known for quite a while that the 3090 Ti would require a different power supply for PC upgraders. The actual power cable is a next-gen PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector, which is a 12+4 pin cable that can deliver up to 600 watts of power. It’s also part of the ATX 3.0 standard for new PSUs that Intel recently announced. That means any modern ATX power supply should work with the cable without the need for an adapter.

Videocardz

This new cable can deliver between 150W and 600W, which exceeds the power delivery of the included triple 8-pin adapter. However, not every power supply on the market is compatible with the 12VHPWR, so Nvidia has included the triple 8-pin adapter to make sure the card works on every setup.

Recommended Videos

The triple 8-pin adapter shows just how much power the RTX 3090 T is going to draw. When the original 3090 shipped, it included a 12-pin to double 8-pin adapter. Nvidia’s reasoning was very similar at the time. The RTX 3090’s 350W TDP put it well ahead of its competition — and even other Nvidia cards — when it comes to power draw. With a third 8-pin connector added for the 3090 Ti, we can expect this card to well exceed the TDP of the 3090. Our previous reporting indicates the TDP could fall anywhere between 400W and 500W.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

When you look at the specs of the RTX 3090 Ti, it’s no surprise that it will require this much juice. The flagship card runs 10,572 CUDA cores (compared to 10,496 on the regular 3090) and 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

The 3000 series of RTX cards (particularly the higher-end ones) are known for being power-hungry, especially compared to prior generations. That’s something AMD’s latest series of GPU cards is apparently aiming to beat Nvidia at. We are still several months away from seeing next-generation cards, though. The RTX 3090 is much closer, with an expected launch date of March 28.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Caleb Clark
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Caleb Clark is a full-time writer that primarily covers consumer tech and gaming. He also writes frequently on Medium about…
How 8GB VRAM GPUs could be made viable again

Perhaps there is still some hope for GPUs with low VRAM. According to a new patent published by Microsoft, the company worked out a method that could make ray tracing and path tracing more viable in terms of how much video memory (VRAM) they use. As of right now, without using upscaling techniques, seamless ray tracing requires the use of one of the best graphics cards—but this might finally change if this new method works out as planned.

This new patent, first spotted by Tom's Hardware, describes how Microsoft hopes to reduce the impact of ray tracing on GPU memory. It addresses the level of detail (LOD) philosophy, which is already something that's used in games but not in relation to ray tracing, and plans to use LOD to adjust ray tracing quality dynamically, thus lowering the load that the GPU -- particularly its memory -- has to bear.

Read more
Nvidia DLSS is amazing, but only if you use it the right way

Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, has become a cornerstone feature of modern PC games. It started as a way to boost your performance by rendering a game at a lower resolution, but the prominence and popularity of DLSS have prompted Nvidia to add even more features under the name.

Today, DLSS incorporates several different features, all of which leverage AI to boost performance and/or image quality. It can be intimidating if you're a new RTX user, so I'm here to break down all of the increases of DLSS in 2024 and how you can best leverage it in supported games.
The many features of DLSS

Read more
Nvidia is the ‘GPU cartel,’ says former AMD Radeon manager

AMD's former senior vice president and general manager of Radeon has come out with some strong words against Nvidia. Scott Herkelman called Nvidia "the GPU cartel" in response to a story from the Wall Street Journal in which Nvidia's customers claim that it delays GPU shipments in retaliation for those customers shopping with other suppliers.

The accusation in question comes from Jonathan Ross, CEO of AI chip startup Groq, who said, "a lot of people that we meet with say that if Nvidia were to hear that we were meeting, they would disavow it. The problem is you have to pay Nvidia a year in advance, and you may get your hardware in a year, or it may take longer, and it's, 'Aw shucks, you're buying from someone else, and I guess it's going to take a little longer.'"

Read more