Packaging

The Card

Just like their other GeForce 30 cards, the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition looks amazing—it's such a fantastic design that's more "iPhone" than "graphics card." NVIDIA paid lots of attention to creating an industrial design that goes beyond just "pretty cooler front + RGB" and created a great-looking product that looks like a single piece from all sides instead of a combination of PCB, cooler, backplate, etc.


Dimensions of the card are 31.5 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 2223 g.


The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is enormous in size. From left to top right: RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3090, and RTX 3090 Ti.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports.


The RTX 3090 Ti introduces the new 16-pin power connector—note the four small pins above the larger 12 pins. This connector is specified for up to 600 W power delivery. All RTX 3090 Ti cards come bundled with a 3x 8-pin to 12-pin adapter (the four small sense pins aren't used). While the ATX specification states that the card should limit itself to 150 W if the four small sense pins aren't connected, NVIDIA made sure even the 3x 8-pin adapter scenario capable of up to 525 W (3x 150 W + 75 W from the slot) runs the card at optimal settings.


The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti supports SLI, but know that NVIDIA isn't supporting SLI as implicit multi-GPU (SLI as you know it), but explicit multi-GPU that's developed and supported by game and application developers. With multi-GPU game support pretty much non-existent, this basically means SLI is dead.

Teardown

I'll spare you all the details of disassembly as they are pretty much the same as for the RTX 3080 due to the memory on one side. Find our detailed step-by-step guide here.


NVIDIA's cooler uses a large vapor chamber base paired with four heatpipes. The cooler looks identical to the RTX 3090 for all but no more memory chips on the back that have to be cooled. We asked NVIDIA, and they confirmed that the vapor chamber has received some tweaks.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Unlike the GeForce RTX 3090 non-Ti, there are no memory chips to cool on this side, which simplifies the cooling requirements and helps avoid the high memory temperatures seen on RTX 3090 FE.