First RTX 3090 Ti pre-orders appear online for almost $4,000
Trouble in paradise for Nvidia
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Remember the RTX 3090 Ti? You know, the one that Nvidia silently delayed? According to Moore’s Law is Dead, the RTX 3090 Ti’s production was delayed indefinitely after production was halted. However, now the YouTuber assumes that the card isn’t going to be appearing any time soon. We’ve seen no AIB boxes for the RTX 3090 Ti, and we’ve only yet seen the cooler for the RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin. But, why is this all happening?
RTX 3090 Ti delayed indefinitely?
Moore’s Law is Dead’s sources claim that Nvidia has gone silent with the card itself since the news that production was halted indefinitely. It’s going to be incredibly low-volume, with the card’s availability only in extremely limited quantities. We can only assume that the card is having yield issues with the GA102 chip, which needs to be an exceptional performer if they are going to segment this chip into as many performance ‘buckets’ as they have done so thus far. It’s worth mentioning that GA102 is currently being used in the RTX 3080, RTX 3080 12GB, RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090. Therefore, it’s not that bad if chips don’t make the binning process involved in the creation of an RTX 3090 Ti, because they can simply reuse the chip elsewhere in the stack. But, if the yields for these ‘golden samples’ are so limited, why announce the product in the first place?
Moore’s Law is Dead also attributes the delay to the Lunar New Year holidays, where they encountered production problems, everyone goes on holiday for a few weeks. It’s also a cultural tradition to switch jobs around the Lunar New Year, therefore this could be a part of the reason why the RTX 3090 Ti has been delayed. It’s speculated that the card is going to release from anywhere between the tail end of February, all the way to the end of April. It’s really all up in the air as of the time of writing.
Nvidia wants to appear competitive
The GPU market is an ever-evolving place at the moment, with various manufacturers coming out with either refreshes, new cards or entirely new lines of GPU. AMD is preparing the RX 6X50 XT series on their high-end chips, and Intel is preparing themselves to launch their Arc Alchemist dedicated desktop GPUs. Therefore. Nvidia wants to keep themselves competitive with regards to what they are doing, and of course, want to keep the performance crown if anything threatens them. That’s why the RTX 3090 Ti even exists, especially for the spotted pre-order pricing that has gone live in certain places.
RTX 3090 Ti pre-orders go live for almost $4,000
Despite the delays, the halting of manufacture, the fact that we’ve not seen many, if any AIB SKUs go live yet, somehow stores are still taking pre-orders for the card. Moore’s Law is Dead has also reported that retailers in Vietnam have put up their initial pre-order page for the GALAX GeForce EX Gamer Black Edition RTX 3090 for around $3,840 USD. If this is one of the more basic cooling solution on the card, and if we account for international pricing, we could be seeing the card retail at around $4,000 in the US and more than that in Europe and the UK. Of course, this card isn’t going to give you the best price to performance in the world, but it’s instead intended to be a world-record producing card when it comes to benchmarks. It’s entirely overkill for most use-cases, especially for gaming.
