With Nvidia’s recent announcement that it’ll be detailing its “latest graphics innovations” on September 1, we imagine excitement for upcoming RTX 30-series consumer GPUs is rife. These should become some of the best graphics cards of 2020 and 2021, and will give many gamers opportunity for a new upgrade. We’ve seen no official pictures of 30-series GPUs or PCBs, but now we have some pictures that supposedly show an RTX 3090’s PCB.
These images were posted on the Nvidia subreddit and have now been removed – they’ve been captured and tweeted by Harukaze5719 (via VideoCardz). They show what’s supposed to be the back side of an RTX 3090’s PCB… but any identifying information whatsoever has been obscured. This, BeokaChina (the original Reddit poster) says, is because “we have to hide some sensitive content”. To hide the GPU, an Intel chip is placed on top of the PCB. We’ve reached out to Nvidia for comment and will update as soon as we hear back.
While our first look at the 3090’s PCB is an exciting prospect, it’s important to realise that there is no GPU-identifying information anywhere in these pictures, and it’s far from confirmed from these leaked pictures alone. The only thing that really points towards it being a new PCB is the different NVLink connector. It could be legit – but it could also just as easily not be.
If – if – it is a picture of the 3090’s PCB then here are some things we can tell from the images and based on what the poster says:
- It’s an AIB model rather than a Founders Edition
- The 11 (or more) memory modules are on the back of the PCB
- There’s a revised NVLink connector
- It requires three eight-pin power connectors
Colorful RTX 3090 PCBhttps://t.co/5nCMHyNaft pic.twitter.com/wG0h1WnSQH
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) August 14, 2020
Points one, three, and four are fairly self-explanatory, but point two says more than you might initially think. Memory is usually found on the front of the PCB, but if it’s found on the back this might mean it’s running dual memory modules on both the front and back, meaning there should be 22GB or more of GDDR6X VRAM.
I say “11 (or more)” memory modules because so much of the image is blurred out that there could very well be another module or two underneath the GPU die. The most recent rumour about Nvidia 30-series GPU memory is that The RTX 3090/3080 Ti should have 24GB VRAM – if there’s another memory module hiding in the blurred part of the image, and if it is, in fact, dual memory (and if the image is legit) then this would corroborate the other rumour.
All this being said, there’s no way to tell. And there likely won’t be any way to tell until we hear from Nvidia itself on September 1. We should definitely take images like this with more than a pinch of salt – perhaps a bucketful. And we can likely expect more such images and rumours as September 1 and a possible RTX 30-series GPU lineup launch approaches.