Skip to main content

Get ready: You’ve never seen a GPU as absurd as this

A prototype cooler for Nvidia's unreleased graphics card.
Hayaka / Goofish

Nvidia may have given up on the idea of an RTX 4090 Ti, but traces of these cards can still be found in various prototypes. That includes a massive quad-slot cooler, and today, another interesting detail has appeared in photos online. Apparently, it comes with a hidden fan.

This prototype certainly has the juice necessary to cool even the best graphics cards, but for most of us, it would have been a liability instead of a good thing.

Recommended Videos

RTX 4090 (Ti) or TITAN ES? 4 slot and 3 fan design
via: https://t.co/hknkjMlNK9 pic.twitter.com/p7z5na7LUz

— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) July 30, 2023

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

Initially posted by Hayaka on Goofish, it was now spotted by Twitter leaker harukaze5719. It’s hard to say whether this cooler was made for the RTX Titan Ada, an RTX 4090 Ti, or something else entirely, but suffice it to say, you wouldn’t have needed it to cool the likes of an RTX 4060 — we’re definitely looking at an enthusiast-grade product with the AD102 GPU inside. It could even have been a cooler for the RTX 4090, but Nvidia seems to have scrapped the idea.

This is a quad-slot cooler, and when Hayaka disassembled it, they found that it actually comes with three fans — there’s a small hidden fan inside, plus two large fans on the outside. The design of the cooler suggests that the GPU it was made for would have had a PCB mounted at a 90-degree angle. To that end, there are 22 heat pipes and a vapor chamber built to support this design.

The prototype only sports one 12VHPWR power connector, meaning that it can receive up to 600 watts of power, and the GPU would likely have been prone to the melting problems that also plagued the RTX 4090. The cable loops around the heatsink due to the unique PCB design.

Adding a third fan inside certainly would have boosted the airflow quite a bit, and that’s never a bad thing. However, there’s no telling how loud such a cooler would have been when operating at full power. Needing to wear noise-canceling headphones just to use your PC doesn’t sound that appealing. This type of design also may have been slightly overkill, even for high-end GPUs, because those cards often end up in systems with custom loop liquid cooling, so the temperatures are kept at bay anyway. On the other hand, keeping such expensive components cool is a must if you want them to stay stable.

While Nvidia reportedly scrapped the RTX 4090 Ti, we still don’t know whether an RTX Titan Ada card might be happening. We’ve seen photos of an unnamed RTX 40-series card with a gold shroud — a tell-tale sign of the Titan card — so it could still be happening. Perhaps this cooler will find its way into that GPU.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
Nvidia is reportedly sunsetting the RTX 4090
The RTX 4090 sitting alongside the Fractal Terra case.

The RTX 4090 is undoubtedly the best graphics card you can buy right now from a performance standpoint, but Nvidia is reportedly discontinuing the flagship GPU. Reports from the Board Channel forums (shared by Wccftech) suggest Nvidia is preparing to end production of the RTX 4090 and the China-exclusive RTX 4090D starting next month in order to make way for next-gen RTX 50-series graphics cards.

It's not surprising that Nvidia would wind down production of the RTX 4090 as the next generation of graphics cards approaches. Flagship GPUs like the RTX 4090 don't have much of a shelf life after a new generation has released, which is something we saw in action with the RTX 3090. Although Nvidia could end production of the GPU in October (the company itself hasn't, and likely won't, confirm that detail publicly), the card won't immediately disappear from store shelves.

Read more
The viral ‘GPU purse’ costs $1,024 — but you can make your own for $40
A purse made out of a GT 730 GPU.

I never thought the best graphics cards would become a fashion statement, much less some of the worst, but here we are. Over the weekend, a website called GPU Purse went live with a listing for a discarded Nvidia GT 730 GPU -- a $20 used GPU -- that had been turned into a handbag. You'll just need to shell out $1,024 for the bag, which, according to the product page, fits a phone and comes complete with a long or short chain.

One look at the website sets off alarm bells, especially for a product that's over $1,000, but it appears there's some legitimacy behind it. Financial Times reports that the GPU Purse is the brainchild of Tessa Barton, a New York Times alum and current pretraining engineer at Databricks. Barton reportedly set up a Shopify store in haste after a post on X (formerly Twitter) went viral last week with over 1.4 million impressions.

Read more
Wait, what? Nvidia’s RTX 50-series might be ready to go this month
RTX 4090.

Update: According to MEGAsizeGPU on X (formerly Twitter), the following might be a mistranslation. The source reportedly talks about Nvidia finalizing the design for Blackwell in September instead of launching the card. No details about the release date have been confirmed. The original article follows below.

Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics cards are coming -- we know that for a fact. But when? The release dates of these graphics cards have been the topic of much speculation. Early leakers predicted that they'd launch in late 2024, but the general consensus slowly shifted toward an early 2025 release instead.

Read more