NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card may implement a design closely resembling the cinder block product design the company readied for its RTX 4090 Ti graphics card that never materialized into a marketable product. This sees a 4-slot thick board design, with a slender main logic PCB arranged along the plane of the motherboard, on top of which the cooling solution is mounted perpendicular to the plane, as shown in the images below. This main logic board contains the GPU, memory, and VRM. There two additional PCBs—one has the display I/O, and the other has the PCIe interface. There is a fourth disaggregated component, the 12V-2x6 receptacle, located somewhere along the top of the cooling solution.

Confirmation of NVIDIA using the RTX 4090 Ti "cinder block" board design for the RTX 5090 comes from kopite7kimi, a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks. Kopite7kimi mentions a card that has a "Main Board, IO Rigid Board and a separate PCIE slot component (perhaps it should not be considered as the third PCB)," which perfectly describes with the RTX 4090 Ti. NVIDIA had completed the design phase of this card, which made it to its cooling solution OEM (which is likely where the images leaked out from). The company probably decided against launching this product because the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX fell significantly short of the performance proposition of the RTX 4090.

Amidst reports that NVIDIA has shelved plans to release a new flagship RTX 40-series graphics card to top the current RTX 4090, we are getting even more pictures of the company's ingenious product design for what could have been the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, or RTX TITAN (Ada). Pictures of the card's cooling solution has been in the news since January 2023, with more images surfacing in June. We are getting our first images of the cooler disassembled, revealing a startling look at the engineering effort NVIDIA put into this thing.

As we mentioned earlier, the "RTX 4090 Ti" features a unique ruler-shaped PCB that's oriented along the plane of the motherboard, rather than perpendicular to it, like any other add-on card. This is to minimize the spatial footprint of the PCB, and maximize volume for the cooler—which is 4 slots, thick, with its entire thickness dedicated to heat-dissipation, and no obstruction posed by the PCB.

NVIDIA has reportedly shelved plans in the short term to release the rumored GeForce RTX 4090 Ti flagship graphics card, according to Kopite7kimi, a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks. This card had been extensively leaked over the past few months as featuring a cinder block-like 4-slot thickness, and a unique PCB that's along the plane of the motherboard, rather than perpendicular to it. From the looks of it, sales and competition in the high-end/halo segment are too slow, the current RTX 4090 remains the fastest graphics card you can buy, and the company seems unfazed by the alleged Radeon RX 7950 series, given that AMD has already maxed out the "Navi 31" silicon, and there are only so many things the red team can try, to beat the RTX 4090.

That said, the company is reportedly planning more SKUs based on the AD103 and AD106 silicon. The AD103 powers the GeForce RTX 4080, which nearly maxes it out. The AD104 has been maxed out by the RTX 4070 Ti, and there could be a gap between the RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080 that AMD could try to exploit by competitively pricing its RX 7900 series, and certain upcoming SKUs. This creates scope for new SKUs based on cut-down AD103 and the GPU's 256-bit memory bus. The AD106 is nearly maxed out with the RTX 4060 Ti, however there's still room to unlock its last remaining TPC, use faster GDDR6X memory, and attempt to slim the vast gap between the RTX 4060 Ti and the RTX 4070.

Leaked photos of a cinder block-sized NVIDIA flagship graphics card cooler appeared online over a week ago, with speculation pointing to it originating from an extremely powerful RTX-40 series GPU—perhaps a theoretical GeForce RTX 4090 Ti or something codenamed TITAN ADA. The pictured prototype outsizes several existing reference designs—its substantial bulk could be enough to tame the fully unlocked potential of Team Green's already large AD102.

Last week's photos have been traced back to the source—as reported by Wccftech, it seems that a seller on the Chinese Taobao Goofish platform is attempting to flog the unit for roughly $122,750 (888,888 RMB). The seller/site member "Hayaka" is apparently open to accepting offers from the highest bidder, but the prospective buyer will not be getting their hands on any working hardware—the listing is for the cooler alone. No GPU or PCB is included according to the provided information, so the winner will be procuring a very expensive (albeit highly unique) mantelpiece.

According to the NVIDIA roadmap that was spotted in the recently published MLCommons training results, the Ada Lovelace successor is set to come in 2025. The roadmap also reveals the schedule for Hopper Next and Grace Next GPUs, as well as the BlueField-4 DPU.

While the roadmap does not provide a lot of details, it does give us a general idea of when to expect NVIDIA's next GeForce architecture. Since NVIDIA usually launches a new GeForce architecture every two years or so, the latest schedule might sound like a small delay, at least if it plans to launch the Ada Lovelace Next in early 2025 and not later. NVIDIA Pascal was launched in May 2016, Turing in September 2018, Ampere in May 2020, and Ada Lovelace in October 2022.

Back in January, we got our first look at the cinder block-like 4-slot cooling solution of NVIDIA's upcoming flagship graphics card (called either the RTX 4090 Ti, or the TITAN (Ada). "ExperteVallah" on Twitter scored additional pictures of the cooler. Its design sees the heat dissipation surface pushed to the entire thickness of the cooler, and ventilated the entire length.

The card's PCB isn't conventional—not perpendicular to the plane of the motherboard like any other add-in card—but is rather along the plane of the motherboard, with additional breakaway daughter cards interfacing with the sole 12VHPWR power connector, and the PCIe slot. This slender, ruler-shaped PCB spans the entire length of the card, without coming in the way of its heat dissipation surfaces. The length is used for the large AD102 ASIC that's probably maxed out (with all its 144 SM enabled), twelve GDDR6X (possibly faster 23 Gbps), and a mammoth VRM that nearly maxes out the 600 W continuous power delivery design limit of the 12VHPWR.

Here's the very first picture of an alleged upcoming NVIDIA flagship/halo product to be positioned above the GeForce RTX 4090. There are two distinct brand names being rumored for this product—the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, and the NVIDIA RTX TITAN (Ada). The RTX 4090 only uses 128 out of 144 (88 percent) of the streaming multiprocessors (SM) on the 4 nm "AD102" silicon, leaving NVIDIA with plenty of room to design a halo product that maxes it out. Besides maxing out the silicon, NVIDIA has the opportunity to increase the typical graphics power closer to the 600 W continuous power-delivery limit of the 16-pin ATX 12VHPWR connector; and use faster 24 Gbps-rated GDDR6X memory chips (the RTX 4090 uses 21 Gbps memory).

The card is 4 slots thick, with the rear I/O bracket covering all 4 slots. The card's display outputs are arranged along the thickness of the card, rather than along the base. The cooler is a monstrous scale-up of the Dual-Axial Flow Through cooler of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. The card is designed such that the PCB doesn't come up perpendicular to the plane of the motherboard like any other add-on card, but rather, the PCB is parallel to the plane of the motherboard. The PCB is arranged along the thickness of the card. This has probably been done to maximize the spatial volume occupied by the cooling solution, and probably even make room for a third fan. We also predict that the PCB is split in such a way that a smaller PCB has the display I/O, and yet another PCB handles the PCI-Express slot interface. Sufficed to say, the RTX 4090 Ti / RTX TITAN will be an engineering masterpiece by NVIDIA.

A report by Moore's Law is Dead claims that NVIDIA is preparing to launch a new TITAN RTX halo product, based on a maxed-out 4 nm "AD102" silicon. Where does this put the RTX 4090 Ti? Somewhere in between the RTX 4090 and the TITAN RTX Ada, as NVIDIA gave itself plenty of segmentation headroom with the AD102 silicon, by using just 128 out of 144 SM physically present on the silicon, besides the same 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory as the previous-generation. NVIDIA's options with the new TITAN RTX include enabling all 144 SM (18,432 CUDA cores), and using faster 24 Gbps memory, giving the silicon (1152 GB/s memory bandwidth), a stock power-limit closer to the 600 W design limit of the 12VHPWR power connector (RTX 4090 stock typical board power is 450 W).

Moore's Law is Dead also posted what they claim to be the first real-world pictures of the upcoming TITAN RTX Ada. The card is an unabashed 4-slot enlargement of the dual-axial flow-through RTX 4090 Founders Edition, with the cooler capable of higher thermal loads. TITAN RTX cards are marketed as first-party Founders Edition cards only, and not through NVIDIA's AIC board partners as custom-designs. A maxed out AD102, with higher clock speeds, higher power-limit, and faster memory, should be unassailable for custom-design RTX 4090 cards, if NVIDIA wants to sell this card at the kind of prices its last TITAN RTX product sold at—USD $2,500.

GALAX in its website's front-page carousel, may have inadvertently blurted out the existence of a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti "Ada" SKU in the works. This may well be a typo by the designer of its carousel graphic, but the existence of an RTX 4090 Ti SKU isn't a question of if, but when. We know from our September 2022 article that the RTX 4090 only uses 88% of the streaming multiprocessors (SM) physically present on the 4 nm AD102 silicon (that's 128 out of 144 SM, or 16,384 out of 18,432 CUDA cores), although it maxes out its 384-bit GDDR6X memory bus.

The way NVIDIA carved the RTX 4090 out of the AD102 leaves it with plenty of room to create a faster SKU that maxes out the silicon, backing it with more GPU clock speed, possibly even 23 Gbps-rated GDDR6X memory, resulting in a top-spec flagship with ≥10% higher performance than the RTX 4090, to consolidate NVIDIA's position in the high-end segment—not that it's under much of a threat from AMD right now. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX trades blows with the RTX 4080, and is barely a threat to the RTX 4090. NVIDIA would still want something to sell at $2,000 if not more, and the only way it can do so is by maxing out the AD102 and hope that enthusiasts wanting to climb performance leaderboards would want such a card.