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This beastly GPU will require a ridiculous 1.3KW of power

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Nvidia is expected to announce its highly anticipated flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU at CES 2022, and thanks to a leak, we have an early look at the graphics card’s power consumption levels.

A QuasarZone forum member said that one of Nvidia’s board partners, EVGA, has entered the final stage of development of its 3090 Ti Kingpin graphics card.

A black EVGA RTX 3090 graphics card with pastel RGB lighting on top.
EVGA

Other details reportedly revealed what sort of power the RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin can consume. Specifically, the graphics card will apparently require dual 12-pin power connectors, which, as VideoCardz notes, would be based on the new generation PCIe Gen 5.0 power connector.

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The connector itself, which appears to be compatible with the existing NVIDIA 12-pin (Molex Microfit 3.0) connector, sports 12 standard pins and four data paths that are optional.

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Due to the pair of 12-pin power connectors, the EVGA RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin GPU could consume up to 1275W of power. Users naturally won’t be able to generate all that power as it’s unlikely the card will max out at 1.3KW, but it still represents a considerable boost of nearly 750W of more power than a 3x 8-pin configuration, which delivers a maximum 525W.

As PCGamer points out, the original 3090 comes with a 350W TDP (thermal design power), which indicates that the more powerful 3090 Ti variant could reach 400W. Other models of the 3090 Ti like EVGA’s Kingpin could potentially exceed 500W. Elsewhere, the Hydro Copper water blocks found on the RTX 3090 Kingpin are reportedly not compatible with the 3090 Ti model.

Previous rumors suggested that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will be powered by 21Gbps of GDDR6X memory, based on 2GB GDDR6X memory modules. As a result, the powerful graphics card will deliver 1TBps of bandwidth. The RTX 3090 Ti is also expected to become Nvidia’s first GPU for the consumer market to make use of the full GA102 GPU through its 10,752 CUDA cores.

The forum post alluded to the existing Kingpin model of the RTX 3090 as being discontinued. The upcoming Ti model of the GPU, meanwhile, will undoubtedly launch with a higher MSRP. Comparatively, the original model had a price point of $2000. The price jump is a given, though, considering the fact that it’ll become the most powerful Ampere-based card on the market.

The RTX 3090 Ti will most likely be revealed tomorrow at Nvidia’s CES 2022 keynote, while a release date is said to be scheduled for January 27.

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Zak Islam
Zak Islam
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Zak Islam was a freelance writer at Digital Trends covering the latest news in the technology world, particularly the…
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