It’s proving extremely difficult to find stock of any RTX 30-series graphics cards, and that’s unlikely to change now we have a cheaper RTX 3060 Ti on the market. However, Asus is pushing ahead at the other end of the market by launching a GeForce RTX 3090 with a different cooling solution and the smallest of overclocks.
Nvidia’s RTX 3080 and 3090 cards use a hybrid vapor chamber cooler, which is far from cheap. However, as Videocardz reports (via GDM), Asus’ new GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo replaces it with a custom blower-type cooler. This is expected to provide two advantages and one disadvantage. The blower cooler is cheaper and it pushes more of the hot air produced by the card outside of your system case, but it’s a noisier solution.
Everything else about this Turbo card is the same as the standard RTX 3090, including 24GB of GDDR6X memory and 10,496 CUDA cores. However, Asus is using its GPU Tweak software to automatically overclock the chip from 1,700MHz to 1,725MHz. It a 1.8 percent overclock on the already extremely high performance Founder’s Edition card, but every little helps. It’s also worth noting that Asus isn’t alone in switching to a blower cooler and adding Turbo to the name. Gigabyte has done the same thing, but the core clock is lower at 1,695MHz.
It’s worth remembering that the RTX 3090 is the only model to support the NVLink connector, and the blower-type cooler could certainly help keep system temperatures manageable when running two of these cards together. That’s assuming you can even source two, let alone afford to buy them. Pricing hasn’t been revealed yet, but Asus’ new card is unlikely to cost less than the MSRP of $1,499.
