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

Monica J. White
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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.

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

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.

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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.

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Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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