Earlier today, a strange picture of a graphics card PCB that has many parts blurred out was posted on the Bilibili Chinese forums by user YuuKi_AnS. The leaker first claimed this is the back of a custom PCB for an upcoming Colorful Vulcan RTX 3090 model, but later on rectified that the manufacturer told him it is for an RTX 3080 model. It is still unclear what model will get this PCB, because there are some elements that we would not usually find on an xx80 model.
First of all, there appear to be 11 memory modules around the GPU area amounting to at least 22 GB of RAM, which seems a bit overkill for an xx80 card. The serial numbers on the memory modules have been blurred out as well, but it looks like they could be the new Micron GDDR6X models. Moreover, there is a different Nvlink connector on the upper right side, plus the upper left side features an impressive triple 8-pin power connector, suggesting that the card could be capable of 450 W TGPs
The leaker also says that he deliberately covered the GPU area with an Intel CPU in order to better hide the special external chip on the back, which was previously speculated to be a Traversal ray tracing co-processor. However, according to a recently uncovered listing coming directly from Micron, which confirms the existence of the RTX 3090 equipped with GDDR6X VRAM, it looks like the special chip may be an AI inference accelerator.
So now we have official confirmation that the RTX 3090 is real and will be equipped with the faster 21 Gbps GDDR6x modules capable of 1 TB/s transfers. Yet again, we are still unsure if the PCB leaked on the Chinese forums is indeed for the RTX 3090 model, plus we have not heard much related to this model's launch date. It may launch with the RTX 3070 and 3080 models on September 1, or maybe at a later date.
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