[Hardware] Asus Spins Up RTX 3090 Turbo With Blower-Style Cooler

[Agent47]

 

Nvidia might have launched its RTX 3090 way back in September, but it and its partners can't seem to produce enough to meet demand. Meanwhile, the release of new variants isn't stopping either, and according to GDM and VideoCardz Asus is apparently coming out with the RTX 3090 Turbo, which comes with the same 24GB of GDDR6X RAM as other RTX 3090 cards. However the RTX 3090 Turbo provides a 25 MHz overclock and uses a blower-style cooler.

Although blower-coolers have a (justified) reputation for being loud and inefficient, they have their use cases. For one, they dump all the heat outside the chassis ensuring the high heat output doesn't clog up the rest of your system -- with the RTX 3090's 350 W TDP, dumping the heat directly outside the system can make quite a difference. They're also cheap.
That latter argument is probably the most relevant argument for their existence -- a cheap cooler means the graphics card can be had for less, which at the end of the day translates to better value for your money. If you're someone that simply doesn't care about noise levels or thermals, and just wants a functional RTX 3090 card for creative workloads because you need that 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, a card like this can be a "cheap" ticket in.

Conversely, these cards are also po[CENSORED]r among watercooling crowds that do care about thermals and noise levels, because why pay extra for a cooler that you're going to ditch in favor of a waterblock anyway?

The card occupies only two expansion slots, and its two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors reside at the back end of the GPU instead of on the side. There's also no RGB to be found here, and display outputs consist of three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1 output.
Asus' RTX 3090 Turbo does come with a small factory overclock to 1725 MHz, which is 25 MHz over Nvidia's reference specification. You'll have to activate it manually though, and chances are your real-life Boost speeds will be lower due to the limited cooling potential of the blower cooler.

Nvidia's RTX 3090 is the company's latest flagship graphics card (our review of the Founder's Edition RTX 3090 here), though with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and a whopping 10,496 CUDA core count, it's aimed primarily at creative professionals who need the grunt for rendering. Of course, if money is no objection, it does make for the Best 4K Gaming Card currently on the market. 

Asus hasn't revealed pricing for this model, but in a world without scalpers, we would expect this one to land close, or at Nvidia's MSRP of $1499.