What just happened? Images of what is allegedly a third-party model of the GeForce RTX 4090 have surfaced online. Assuming they're the real deal, the card is, as expected, humongous, with a quad-slot (at least) design and a cooler that extends way beyond the PCB.
The new images from Baidu allegedly show the RTX 4090 AMP Extreme from Zotac. It has a redesigned cooler that seems to be dividing opinion; it's definitely different. The triple-fan card also appears to be at least four slots big, and there's a single 16-pin PCIe Gen 5.0 (12VPWHR) connector, which can deliver 600W across 12 rails, four times as much as an 8-pin connector.
The card also appears to feature the all-new font Nvidia is said to be using for its line of next-gen Lovelace products.
The box shows updated versions of features such as Icestorm 3.0, as well as support for dual BIOS, Firestorm software utilities, and Spectra 2.0 RGB lighting suite.
Many of the rumors about the RTX 4000-series revolve around the RTX 4090. Last month, reports claimed it was in production and would be the first Lovelace card to arrive. It might even be the only one released this year, if a different rumor is to be believed.
There were reported leaked synthetic benchmarks last week showing the RTX 4090 performing 78% faster than the current-gen RTX 3090 Ti flagship in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme while reaching a blistering 3.0 GHz. The same rumor said the card will have a default TDP of 450W, though it is designed for 600W to 800W, which lines up with a previous claim of it having a power limit of 800W but a lower default TDP.
The RTX 4090 with its AD102 GPU has long been expected to be a beast in terms of size, power, and probably price. It's expected to have 16,384 CUDA cores, which is 56% more than the RTX 3090 and a 52% jump over the RTX 3090 Ti. We've also heard it could pack 24 GB of GDDR6X@21 Gbps with a 384-bit bus, enabling a maximum bandwidth of 1 TB/s. We'll no doubt find out more during GTC on September 20.