More evidence of a flagship RTX 40 series desktop graphics card has surfaced online. As we have discussed separately, NVIDIA is now thought to have shelved the RTX 4090 Ti, with the company considering the RTX 4090 as a worthy foil for AMD's RDNA 3 product stack. In other words, NVIDIA does not think there is enough rivalry to justify producing an even more powerful version of the RTX 4090.
The appearance of an unreleased RTX 40 series cooler suggests as much, which spans four slots. Not only is this prototype considerably larger than the existing RTX 4090, but it also has a more complex cooler. On the one hand, the cooler is alleged to combine 22 heat pipes with a vapour chamber to keep the alleged complete AD102 GPU in check.
On the other hand, a third fan is also visible, underlining the extreme cooling requirements that this graphics card had. Reputedly, NVIDIA designed the cooler for the PCB to sit at a 90-degree angle to the PCIe interface, resulting in the sight of the 12VHPWR cable trailing around the heatsink to its connector. While an RTX 4090 Ti may now be off the table, we would not be surprised if this quad-slot cooler returned in some form, potentially in the likes of the GeForce RTX 5090.
Source(s)
Goofish via @harukze5719, OC3D & VideoCardz