GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics cards are bundled with 3×8-pin to PCIe Gen5 (16-pin) power adapters

PCIe Gen5 cable adapter to feed 450W of power

The upcoming flagship RTX 3090 Ti graphics card will require special power cable adapters. 

According to the leaks, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has a TDP of 450W. With such a high power input, even two 8-pin PCIe power are not sufficient, such configuration can only sustain 300W of power.

This is a major difference between the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti cards. The Founders Edition of the former flagship SKU released in 2020 features a 12-pin connector (basically the same cable but without the ‘sense’ pins). It shipped with dual 8-pin to 12-pin power adapter. This is obviously enough for the 350W TDP because the card still has access to 75W of power through the PCIe interface.

3x 8-pin to PCIe Gen5 power cable, Source: VideoCardz

The RTX 3090 Ti with 100W higher TDP will need three 8-pin power cables or a native implementation of the 12VHPWR (12+4 or 16-pin) PCIe Gen5. However, the power supplies with the native cable will not be available in time for RTX 3090 Ti, which launches on March 29th. For this reason, the adapter is required.

The adapter will provide 450W of power alone and a total of 525W with the PCIe interface. One should expect a number of custom RTX 3090 TI designs to reach 500W of maximum TDP.

GALAX RTX 3090 Ti with PCIe Gen5 power cable

The RTX 3090 Ti features a GA102-350 GPU with all 10752 CUDA cores enabled. This is NVIDIA’s first RTX model with 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory and new power connector. The RTX 3090 Ti should be the last flagship Ampere SKUs to launch before NVIDIA unleashes its Ada GPUs later this year.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 High-End SKU Specifications
VideoCardz	RTX 3090 Ti	RTX 3090	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3080 (10GB)
Picture
GPU	GA102-350	GA102-300	GA102-225	GA102-200
GPU Clusters	84	82	80	68
CUDAs	10752	10496	10240	8704
RT Cores	84	82	80	68
Tensors/TMUs	336	328	320	272
Base Clock	1560 MHz	1395 MHz	1365 MHz	1440 MHz
Boost Clock	1860 MHz	1695 MHz	1665 MHz	1710 MHz
Memory	24 GB G6X	24 GB G6X	12 GB G6X	10 GB G6X
Bus	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit
Memory Clock	21 Gbps	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	19 Gbps
Bandwidth	1008 GB/s	936 GB/s	912 GB/s	760 GB/s
TDP	450W	350W	350W	320W
MSRP	TBC	$1,499	$1,199	$699
Release Date	March 29, 2022	September 24th, 2020	June 3rd, 2021	September 17th, 2020