[Hardware] NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Flagship Ampere Graphics Card Rumored To Cost $1399 US, Will Feature Massive 24 GB GDDR6X Memory

[Dr.Drako]

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 is more or less looking to become the flagship offering in the Ampere Gaming lineup which will be unveiled on September 1st. While we wait, the rumor mill has become a heated place with various leakers and tech outlets giving their own predictions regarding the RTX 3090 pricing.

NVIDIA's Flagship Ampere Graphics Card, The GeForce RTX 3090, Rumored To Cost $1399 US - WIll Feature More Than Double The Memory of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
The latest rumor comes from Wjm47196 who has a history of leaks/rumors that turned out to be true. He has now posted on Chiphell forums that NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 is going to feature a starting price of $1399 US. This is $200 US more than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which had a price of $1199 US for the Founders Edition. It is stated that this is the starting price as the Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 3090 could cost an extra $100 which should put the price of the card at $1499 US.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for comparison had variants starting at $999 US while custom designs went all the way up to $1999 US. NVIDIA was asking a $200 US premium for the Founders Edition variant of the RTX 2080 Ti and while the RTX 3090 may have a $100 US premium for its own FE variant, the base price would be very high, to begin with at $1399 US.

If we compare the rumored base price of the GeForce RTX 3090 with the base price of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, you can see a price bump of 40%. Founders Edition pricing would be a 25% bump over Turing. The main reason for the price bump could be associated with the massive amounts of G6X VRAM that the RTX 3090 incorporates. While the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti featured 11 GB of GDDR6, the GeForce RTX 3090 is expected to feature an insane 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. That's more than 2X the memory buffer which also operates at much higher clock rates for higher bandwidth and along a wider bus too.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 is also going to make use of the GA102 GPU core which is rumored to deliver up to 40-50% performance jump over the RTX 2080 Ti. The GeForce RTX 3090 will be the king of the hill for NVIDIA and they are definitely going all out with its insane specifications hence the pricing has also gone up. This however causes some concern in the enthusiast segment as we can get custom variants that might cost north of $1500 US.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Custom Graphics Cards To Cost North of $1500 US?
Another rumor from the Chiphell forum (via TechPowerUP) details the expected price point of the GeForce RTX 3090 lineup from Colorful. The Chinese graphics card manufacturer is known for some insane designs and this rumor could be linked to the leaked PCB of the RTX 3090 which is also rumored to be a Colorful custom graphics card.

According to the rumor, Colorful is prepping up at least 3 variants of the GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card which include the Vulcan-X, Vulcan-X OC, and the Neptune D. The Vulcan series will make use of a premium custom design with air cooling while the Neptune D graphics card will make use of a water cooling design. Following are the rumored prices in Chinese Yuan:

In terms of pricing, the GeForce RTX 3090 Vulcan X is expected to cost 13,999 Chinese Yuan or $2000+ US, the Vulcan X-OC will cost 15,999 Chinese Yuan or $2300+ US and the Neptune D will cost 12,999 Chinese Yuan or $1900 US. Now given the tax and rebates in the Chinese market, the actual pricing of these cards will be around $1600, $1800, and $1500 US respectively.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - The Fastest Ampere Gaming Graphics Card
According to leaked details, the GeForce RTX 3090  will feature the GA102-300-A1 GPU. The GA102-300-A1 GPU is said to be comprised of 5248 CUDA cores or 82 SMs. In total, that's a 20% increase in cores over the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. No details such as clock speeds, TMU/ROP counts are provided and we can't take the Ampere A100 die as a reference since gaming & HPC parts share a different configuration hierarchy.

Moving on to the memory side, things start to look interesting as it is stated that the card will get up to 24 GB memory with faster GDDR6X pin speeds. Since that's a 384-bit bus we are looking at, it will be able to offer nearly 1 TB/s bandwidth.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 'Ampere' Gaming graphics card lineup is expected to be announced on 1st September at a digital event which will be hosted by CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang. We expect at the very least, three new graphics cards during the event which include the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (or RTX 3090), GeForce RTX 3080, and a next-generation Titan. There's definitely a lot more to talk about regarding the Ampere GPUs but we will have to wait until more information comes our way.