Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will hopefully arrive shortly, and purported specs for an MSI version have been leaked which include a major revelation on the power consumption front.
In fairness, we knew the RTX 3090 Ti would demand a great deal of wattage – the vanilla 3090 already does, after all – but now we know, assuming this leak from @wxnod on Twitter is correct (exercise the usual caution), that MSI’s Suprim X 3090 Ti card could consume 480W (compared to 430W for MSI’s existing Suprim X 3090).
The real eye-opener comes in the form of the PSU that MSI recommends in the leaked spec, which is a 1,000W power supply (compared to an 850W unit for the standard RTX 3090). Yes, a full thousand watts – ouch indeed.
The MSI Suprim X 3090 Ti will supposedly offer a base clock of 1,560MHz, with boost to 1,860MHz, and a further ‘Extreme Mode’ that pushes to 1,900MHz. The CUDA core count is 10,752, by the way, as has been rumored for a while now.
As we mentioned at the outset, the hope is that we’ll see the new 3090 Ti graphics card in late January. Speculation holds that the release date is January 27, but then again, the grapevine also recently claimed Nvidia has run into production hiccups that could mean the GPU’s launch is delayed.
Analysis: Hinting at PSU worries for next-gen graphics cards?
How many people have a 1,000W power supply in their PC? Not many, that’s for sure, and that includes us. Of course, not many people will be looking at buying Nvidia’s absolutely top-end graphics card, either. Certainly not given the rumored price tag which could cause more jaws to drop than this purported power requirement, again if the rumor mill is right on pricing.
Of more concern to the average computer owner out there is the broader issue of GPUs pushing harder still with PSU demands, and the sighting of cards like the 3090 Ti making it easier to believe that next-gen products could actually turn out as the grapevine suggests – to be incredibly power-hungry.
We’ve heard tales of Nvidia’s next-gen ‘Lovelace’ GPUs maybe doubling power requirements, which could mean looking at 600W levels, and this kind of driving forward with wattage at the highest level with Ampere makes that seem perhaps not as unrealistic as it did when we first heard the speculation. (AMD is also rumored to be upping power consumption considerably for next-gen, too, by the way).
The problem for many users could then be if next-gen mid-range demands are also somewhat spiked, then systems with little wattage headroom due to a more modest power supply could be looking at a possible PSU upgrade if switching to a new Lovelace graphics card. And changing power supply not only adds to the overall expense of a GPU upgrade (as if that wasn’t bad enough these days), but also complicates the actual upgrade process considerably.
Via Wccftech
