The RTX 3090 Ti is not due until March 29th, but NVIDIA's new top-dog Ampere card is already costing WAY more than an arm and a leg.
An unknown Canadian retailer recently listed the 3090 Ti for $5239.93 CAD (around $4157 USD at the time of this writing). According to PCGamer, the RTX 3090 Ti model in question was the ASUS ROG Strix LC, which is a liquid-cooled card (hence the LC in the name).
But while liquid-cooled versions of graphics cards do tend to be more expensive than regular, air-cooled ones, this is still an insanely high price tag. And the world has seen insanely enough priced GPUs over the past two years to know the stark difference.
Only look at the base 3090 Ti price, and you'll get the idea of how crazy the markup is. While NVIDIA didn't indicate the MSRP for the 3090 Ti during its announcement, the slightly weaker RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1499. As such, you could assume that the RTX 3090 Ti would originally cost something like just above $2000, but $4000 is just way too much.
The cheapest 3090 Ti price at the aforementioned retailer is not too good as well. It's also an ASUS model: the GF TUF Strix, which is listed for $4,649.19 CAD ($3688.37 USD) at the time of this writing, as per this tweet from renowned industry leaker momomo_us on Twitter:
— 188号 (@momomo_us) March 18, 2022
Here's another piece of perspective concerning the 3090 Ti's price. NVIDIA priced their Titan RTX card at $2499, with the most expensive Titan V at $2999, according to Tom's Hardware. While both cards are actually weaker than a 3090, their MSRPs are still relatively more "reasonable" than that of the 3090 Ti.
However crazy this pricing is, though, this is still pretty much what you'd expect scalper markups to be. But whether this price will go down with other GPUs who have seen price drops lately remains to be seen.
Read Also: The RTX 3090 Ti Is Rumored To Release On March 29th
Is The RTX 3090 Ti Even Worth That Much?
Many tech reviewers are saying that no, it's not. Granted, they're not really fans of the original RTX 3090 to begin with.
Among these tech reviewers is the YouTuber BitWit, who told his viewers to "expect the worst" with the 3090 Ti:
Both the 3090 Ti and the base 3090 both feature the same GA102 GPU. But the former is said to contain the "full fat" silicon, which means the chip will have absolutely no compromises whatsoever. No shaders turned off, no RT cores turned off, nothing.
However, as mentioned by BitWit in his video, the 3090 Ti only features an 11% bump in TFLOPS over the original 3090. It also features essentially the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory, but with a slightly faster memory bandwidth of 21 Gigabits per second vs. the 3090's 19.5 Gigabits per second.
RTX 3090 Ti benchmarks aren't due to come out until the card is launched, but the price-performance ratio is already not looking good. Just consider the current pricing alone: the RTX 3090 might not be too much of a downgrade from a 3090 Ti, but it already costs half as much. Is an expected slight performance bump really worth the extra $2000? The answer is all yours.
Related Article: NVIDIA Hack Reportedly Leaks Info About Ada Lovelace, Hopper, And Other GPUs In The Pipeline
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Written by RJ Pierce
