A long-lost prototype of what is believed to be the RTX 4090 Ti graphics card has resurfaced, thanks to a Reddit user who stumbled upon it while cleaning out a bin of old computer parts. Gamers Nexus managed to get their hands on the prototype and not only benchmarked its performance but also provided a detailed teardown of the unique design. The prototype, featuring a massive cooler and a chunky PCB, showed promising results in thermal benchmarking, staying remarkably cool under load. However, its performance in gaming benchmarks lagged behind the retail RTX 4090 Cybertank, highlighting the expected performance gap between a prototype and a fully optimized consumer product. The mysterious circumstances surrounding this prototype's disappearance from Nvidia's production plans remain a topic of speculation.
The reality of mounting e-waste is just one more thing that keeps me up at night—though every now and then, such a nightmare spits out a real gem. One Reddit user shared that after recently moving, they went rummaging through a bin full of junked computer parts, and pulled out not just a surprisingly decent graphics card , but something genuinely special. Jokes aside, what surfaced on Reddit last year appeared to be a mostly complete prototype, with both the MASSIVE cooler plus the card itself.
I say 'appeared' because including the original photo uploads of the prototype, has since been scrubbed. But fear not! This is far from the final twist in the tale. Gamers Nexus not only benchmarked the prototype of what is thought to be the long lost RTX 4090 Ti, but also shared a teardown of the funky, chunky card. Gamers Nexus first highlighted the hefty GPU's somewhat unusual construction, drawing attention to the front, back, and middle fan placements. This not only sucks airflow straight through the card, but also necessitates a more discretely placed PCB. The board in question is a hefty bit of kit too, running along the belly of this absolute beast—and it's a beast, measuring 80 mm in width. Getting up close and personal with the PCB reveals a densely packed hotbed of tech, with the central GPU The otherwise pretty unwieldy cooler impressed during thermal benchmarking, keeping the GPU at around 46 °C, and more than 20 degrees cooler than that of the retail card. This was comparable to the retail card Gamers Nexus also tested, the Nvidia RTX 4090 Cybertank, which averaged 65 fps. The gap between the two cards soon widened though; in 4K with FSR Quality and ray tracing enabled, the prototype averaged 45 fps, 20 fps behind the retail card. Though not an awful performance by any means, it's an unsurprising performance gap for a somewhat unrefined prototype graphics card—especially without easily accessible, specific drivers to get the most out of the hardware. It's always interesting to glimpse a road not taken in tech, though the big question mark remains why Nvidia never pushed this prototype into full production. Was the cooler simply too thick for this world? Who can say. What I do know for certain is that time marches on, e-waste is still a growing problem, and every now and then, a little piece of history emerges from the digital dustbin.
RTX 4090 Ti Prototype Nvidia Gamers Nexus Graphics Card Benchmark Teardown E-Waste
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