Nvidia's RTX 3090 Ti Costs $1999 And Is Available Now, If You Can Find One
Nvidia announced the beastly GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card at CES in January this year, and after months of inexplicable delay, it has finally arrived on shelves with a hefty $1,999 asking price in tow. Going by the name, it’s obvious that the latest Nvidia GPU is a souped-up version of the GeForce RTX 3090, but the differences aren’t probably worth the bump in asking price. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti increases the number of CUDA cores to 10752, up from 10496 in the non-Titan variant. The boost clock speed has also got a slight bump from 1.70 GHz to 1.86 GHz, while the graphics card power requirement has soared to 450W, compared to 350W on the standard GeForce RTX 3090 GPU.
The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti also leapfrogs over its vanilla sibling with 40 teraflops of GPU performance, a 9 percent boost over the 36 teraflops figure touted by the GeForce RTX 3090. Another minor change is that Nvidia is dropping the 12-pin connector design in favor of a 16-pin PCIe Gen 5 outlet, but a dongle with a trio of 8-pin connectors will also be shipped. The official PCI Express (12VHPWR) specifications sheet mentions a peak power draw of 600W, but over-engineered variants with dual 16-pin connectors have already arrived from partners like EVGA, pushing the power requirement to an astounding 1200W. Needless to say, all that uptake will reflect handsomely on the electricity bill.
Of course, all that raw firepower comes at a price, with an added serving of availability headaches. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition — which also happens to be the cheapest one — will set buyers back by a cool $1,999. Best Buy happens to be the only outlet in the United States that sells the RTX 3090 Ti in a Founders Edition flavor, but the store listing already shows the grim “out of stock” banner. Nvidia says Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, Galax, MSI, PNY, and Zotac among others will be carrying the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti as well, at a slight premium.
The asking price of Nvidia’s latest flagship GPU is already hard to swallow, but scalpers are likely to make the situation even worse. Not too long ago, even the older-gen RTX 2080 Ti was being hawked online for around $2,000. The newer cards, such as the RTX 3080 and 3070, go even higher and the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti situation doesn’t look very optimistic either. The only major outlet that currently has it in stock is Zotac’s official online store, where a custom Extreme Holo version is listed at a $100 premium for $2,100. The EVGA store has the FTW3 Black Edition at the same $2,000 asking price as the Founder’s Edition, but it is currently exclusive to buyers with an Elite Member pass, and the purchase quantity is limited to one per person.
Variants customized by EVGA, Asus, and GigaByte are all out of stock on Newegg, while B&H Photo Video currently has a “coming soon” message splashed on the listing page. Amazon, on the other hand, is yet to list Nvidia’s latest and greatest. Nvidia is targeting its latest creation at science projects that need to churn huge amounts of modeling data sets or AI applications, while creative use case scenarios involve running graphics-intensive rendering and designing software such as Maya. As far as gaming goes, Nvidia explicitly mentions "extreme enthusiasts" as the target audience, one that wants to push 8K 60FPS visuals at max settings with all of that ray-tracing goodness.