Rumor: Nvidia Preparing 800W Titan-Class ‘Beast’ GPU

Here we go again. Just when rumors about Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs’ power consumption had returned to sanity, now they’re going in the opposite direction. This time, it’s rumored Nvidia has a moonshot GPU waiting in the wings. Its job is simple: make sure AMD doesn’t take the top-speed crown this generation. This will be a “no holds barred” GPU with a ludicrous 800W total board power (TBP) and 48GB of GDDR6X memory. No, that is not a typo.

The latest rumor comes from notorious leaker kopite7kimi on Twitter. According to their sources, Nvidia will be returning to its old launch model with Ada Lovelace. That means it will offer a true “flagship” GPU with Titan branding. In other words, a halo product with outrageous specs and pricing. Titan GPUs always sport a lot more VRAM than their GeForce counterparts since they’re made for creators/computation, not gamers. This card will be no different, offering a wallet-busting 48GB of 24Gb/s GDDR6X memory. That’s twice the amount in the current RTX 3090/Ti, and 3X what AMD is offering in its RTX 6950 XT.

It’s also a return to form for Nvidia, as the line between Titan and GeForce has become blurred with Ampere. Instead of a Titan card it launched the RTX 3090 instead. It had Titan-level VRAM with more than twice the amount of the RTX 3080, but was still a GeForce card. The last Titan card Nvidia offered was for its Turing architecture, since the 3090 fills that role for Ampere.

Copious VRAM will also contribute to the card’s outrageous 800W of power consumption. Previously, Nvidia GPUs peaked at 450W for the RTX 3090 Ti. Some of the add-in board (AIB) partner cards pushed that a bit further though. However, Nvidia seems prepared to push that power envelope door wide open this time around, all other concerns be damned.

It remains unclear how it expects to manage all that heat. However, given the numbers involved a hybrid cooler seems likely. Nvidia has never taken this step though, as it has never needed to before. AMD has added 120mm AIO coolers to some of its GPUs in the past, but that’s probably not sufficient for 800W. Its current RTX 3090 Ti card is being sold with a 360mm AIO from EVGA, and that’s only a 450W GPU.

Finally, this “beast” GPU will reportedly sport 18,176 CUDA cores. That’s a hefty 69 percent more cores than the RTX 3090 Ti. Though that’s a sizable increase in GPU cores, it’s not unprecedented. Nvidia more than doubled the CUDA core count going from the RTX 2080 Ti to the 3080 Ti. Now it appears it’ll be doing it once again for Ada Lovelace.

What’s notable about this latest rumor is it lines up with previous rumors. Previously, it was thought there would be three TDPs for the RTX 4090: 450W, 650W, and 850W. So if the 850W model is present, what about the 450W and 650W? That is what is now being reported as the launch schedule for the RTX 4090.

It will allegedly be offered in a 450W Founder’s Edition, with partners allowed to crank it up to 600W. Also, according to Wccftech, the RTX 4090 will be priced lower than the RTX 3090 Ti, which costs $1,999. It might also be the only 40-series GPU Nvidia launches in 2022. Nvidia needs to clear its existing 30-series inventory from the channel before it launches equivalent GPUs. It will still launch its flagship, but it might postpone the rest of the stack until there’s room in the channel for it.