Nearly two years ago, we called the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 a Titan in all but name, a prosumer graphics card that makes sense as a cheaper alternative to professional Quadros while also delivering better gaming performance than any consumer alternative. Now the RTX 3090 Ti has arrived, placing it above the Titans and firmly into the realm of the Olympians – in terms of performance, power consumption and price tag.
The RTX 3090 Ti retails for £1879 in the UK and $1999 in the US, making it a hefty £480/$500 more expensive than its predecessor – that’s a 33 percent markup on what is already an expensive part. In exchange, you get a fully-unlocked GA102 die with 2.4 percent more CUDA cores, a 9.4 percent higher boost clock, a 7.7 percent higher memory clock and a 29 percent higher rated power draw. That suggests we’ll see a faster card than the vanilla 3090, but getting anywhere close to 33 percent extra performance to make the premium worthwhile seems unlikely at this stage.
At 450W, you’ll need an 850W power supply or better to tame the beast – Nvidia note that a 450W PCIe 5.0 power cable or greater will deliver enough juice, or three of the more standard 8-pin PCIe inputs. That’s the Nvidia Founders Edition card, but custom boards are available with higher power targets – some rated near the 525W limit (!) of what’s deliverable via the PCIe connector (75W) and three auxiliary inputs (3x150W), with a 1000W PSU recommended (!!).
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