NVIDIA's Ingenious Product Design for the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti
Recent reports suggest that NVIDIA has decided not to release a new flagship RTX 40-series graphics card to surpass the current RTX 4090. However, more pictures have emerged showcasing the company's impressive product design for what could have been the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or RTX TITAN (Ada). The cooling solution for this card has been a topic of discussion since January 2023, with additional images surfacing in June. Now, we have the first images of the cooler disassembled, providing a fascinating look at NVIDIA's engineering efforts.
As previously mentioned, the "RTX 4090 Ti" features a unique ruler-shaped PCB that is oriented parallel to the motherboard, rather than perpendicular like other add-on cards. This design choice minimizes the spatial footprint of the PCB, allowing for a larger cooler. The cooler itself is 4 slots thick and entirely dedicated to heat dissipation, with no obstruction from the PCB.
Disassembling the cooler reveals a large, continuous aluminum fin-stack that spans the entire length of the card. These fins align with the plane of the motherboard, just like the card's PCB. A remarkable 22 heatpipes draw heat from the base plate, which makes contact with all the hot components on the PCB, including the GPU, VRM, and memory. The heat is then spread along the fin-stack. The base plate, made of nickel-plated copper, has a mirror finish over the contact points where the card's "AD102" GPU, twelve GDDR6X memory chips, and numerous DrMOS components make contact with the card. The 22 heatpipes pull heat from this base plate.
The card is equipped with three fans. One fan is an intake located on the front side of the card, drawing in fresh air. Another fan is located at the back, pulling hot air through the fin-stack and exhausting it on the rear side of the card. The third fan is positioned in the middle of the fin-stack, allowing its airflow to intersect with the other two fans. The airflow from all three fans passes through the fin-stack without obstruction from the PCB.
In addition to the PCB, the RTX 4090 Ti has three breakout components. The first is a perpendicular PCI-Express 4.0 x16 finger, allowing the card to slot into the motherboard like any other add-on card. The second component is a satellite PCB located on top of the card, featuring a 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector.
The third component is an innovative new cable that connects the power receptacle PCB to the card's main PCB. This cable consists of two flattened non-braided copper cables, conveying 12V DC power from the connector to the PCB in a 2-pin format. Each cable can deliver 600W continuously, within the ATX 3.0 specification. Additionally, there are four signal pins from the 12VHPWR being conveyed to the PCB using a thinner set of cables.
NVIDIA has gone to great lengths to create a cooling solution capable of handling a fully utilized "AD102" GPU with all its 72 TPCs (144 SM) or 18,432 CUDA cores enabled. This card would have found its place in NVIDIA's product lineup if the Radeon RX 7900 XTX posed a threat to the RTX 4090, which it does not. It remains to be seen how much AMD will push the performance of the already maxed out "Navi 31" GPU in the upcoming Radeon RX 7950 XTX, which could potentially prompt NVIDIA to respond with this card.
