Photos leak of possible NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/3090

VideoCardz came across some photos of what is claimed to be an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 video card. The PCB of this card has a massive 11 memory modules, which seems a bit too much for the RTX 3080. This causes VideoCardz to speculate that this may actually be the RTX 3090, even though the leaker himself claims the manufacturer told him it is an RTX 3080.

Interestingly, the leaker says there's an external chip on the back of the card, but the purpose of this chip is unknown. What also stands out is that this card has a whopping three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. It's been speculated for some time now that the upcoming high-end lineup from NVIDIA may be quite power hungry.

Word on the street is that NVIDIA was unable to secure enough 7nm capacity at TSMC as it got leapfrogged by AMD. As a result, NVIDIA allegedly saw itself forced to use Samsung's 8nm process for the first wave of Ampere GPUs and this would explain a higher-than-expected power draw. A future refresh is expected to use TSMC's 7nm node, which will result in more favorable power efficiency.

This model is most likely a custom design with much bigger heatsink extending over the card. This graphics card appears to be equipped with three 8-pin power connectors. The original leaker claimed it could be Colorful Vulcan graphics card, however, we are unable to confirm this.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will reveal the company's Ampere-based gaming cards at a virtual event on September 1st.