Over the past year, we've seen several different "leaks" of a scuttled Nvidia cooling apparatus the size of a small rodent. Nvidia designed this cooling monstrosity for a GPU that never saw the light of day but remained in the labs like a weapon kept in a holster in case it was needed. We now have new pictures showing a third fan embedded within the fin stack. This third fan wasn't always visible since the GPU's shroud usually hid it. We'll probably never know what GPU it was designed for, but perhaps we'll see it reappear when Blackwell launches in 2025.
New photos of this gigantic cooler have appeared on Twitter, er, X, by a user named @harukaze5719, but it's unclear how this prototype device fell into their hands. It shows the familiar quad-slot design we've seen a few times before, but with the added twist that we can now see a third fan sandwiched between the heatsinks in the middle of the GPU. Previous leaks showed this cooler with the shroud attached, so this is a new look at the cooler's guts. It seems to indicate it was designed to offer even more cooling power than previously thought, hinting that Nvidia was likely planning something along the lines of a 600W GPU. The RTX 4090 has a 450W TDP, for reference.
According to the poster, this GPU was designed to handle "violent" heat specifications, which are attributed to a Samsung product. As Hothardware notes, the RTX 40-series was built with TSMC silicon, whereas Ampere was made by Samsung, so it's likely a reference to the onboard GDDR6 memory. However, that makes little sense since Nvidia uses Micron's GDDR6X memory for its high-end boards. Therefore, it's possible it was testing Samsung's memory at one point. After all, the company did announce 24Gb/s GDDR6 modules several months before the 40-series launched, which were faster than Micron's 21Gb/s GDDR6X chips, but by then, it was likely way too late in the process to switch memory suppliers.
The tweet (we are not calling it an X or whatever) also mentions that the cooler featured 22 heat pipes connected to a vapor chamber. For reference, a card like the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC, which is a non-premium version of this GPU, features 10 heat pipes and a vapor chamber.
This cooler was made for something far beyond the RTX 4090, indicating Nvidia was contemplating a Titan-class GPU with a full-fat AD102 GPU inside. As you may recall, the RTX 4090 that launched features a cut-down version of AD102, and the full version has never been released for PC gamers. However, in the past, the full version of a die was used in Titan versions of an architecture, but now it seems Nvidia prefers just to sell those dies to high-paying AI customers instead.
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