Hands-on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition picture showcases the card's gargantuan size and ungainly power connector

The GeForce RTX 3090 arrives on September 24, but someone has posted a hands-on image of a pre-production Founders Edition model on Chiphell. NVIDIA has already confirmed that the RTX 3090 is a triple-slot card, for which it recommends at least a 750 W power supply. The card itself supposedly draws 350 W, which is 90 W higher than the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition.

The photo from Chiphell really gives a sense of how big the RTX 3090 is. At 313 x 138 mm, the RTX 3090 will be too long for many Mini Tower (MicroATX) and Mid Tower (ATX) cases. As Videocardz points out, the RTX 3090 Founders Edition on display here differs from retail units slightly. NVIDIA added titanium elements to the final design, possibly to make the RTX 3090 Founders Edition more eye-catching than the all-black design of the pre-production model.

Another element that stands out is the position of the card's power connector. RTX 30 series Founders Edition cards have 12-pin power connectors, unlike custom cards produced by add-in-board (AIB) partners. The one on the RTX 3090 Founders Edition protrudes from the middle of the top of the card, which could make cable management a chore, especially when using the 12-pin to dual 8-pin power connector adapter.

The added size of the RTX 3090 does come with some serious performance improvements over the RTX 3080, though. NVIDIA has crammed 10,496 CUDA cores onto the RTX 3090 Founders Edition, along with 328 Tensor cores, 82 RT cores and 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM. However, it also costs over two times more than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which costs US$699.

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