It will be another couple of weeks before Nvidia's recently unveiled GeForce RTX 3090 finds its way to store shelves, and in the meantime, its add-in board partners (AIBs) are readying custom models. One in particular has caught our eye. In a promotional video highlighting its upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 with iCX3 technology, EVGA shows the card being overclocked to 2,105MHz (just over 2.1GHz) via its Precision X1 software.
Nvidia's reference blueprint for the 3090 calls for a 1.4GHz base clock and 1.7GHz boost clock, so running it at 2.1GHz would represent a tantalizing OC. In fact, the 3090 is the slowest clocked model (so far) of the GeForce RTX 30 series—boost clocks on the 3080 and 3070 check in at 1.71GHz and 1.73GHz, respectively.
Just like in the land of CPUs, typically the higher the core count, the slower the clockspeed, at least at the top end. In this case, we're talking about 10,496 CUDA cores on the 3090, versus 8,704 CUDA cores on the 3080 and 5,888 CUDA cores on the 3070.
The 3090 is basically this generation's RTX Titan, priced at $1,499. Nvidia kicked the Titan branding to the curb this time around (for now, anyway), and opened up its top part to AIBs instead of keeping the SKU all to itself. Though, to be fair, that feels like a bit of a retcon given that the RTX 2080 Ti was effectively the 20-series' ultra-enthusiast Titan-class card anyway.
Curiously, the screenshot in the video below indicates a 500MHz jump, though by my math, it's a 410MHz leap from 1,695MHz to 2,105MHz. Regardless, it would be odd for EVGA to highlight a specific frequency if the shipping product was not able to also hit that that speed.
Twitter user CyberPunkCat spotted the enticing overclock starting at the 1min28sec mark in EVGA's video. Here it is:
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That's not a guarantee that EVGA's upcoming 3090 will hit that speed—it's also possible that there was some miscommunication between EVGA's engineers and its marketing department, or even that this is purely a mocked up image as a demonstration. Time will tell.
But EVGA is not the only one hinting at aggressive overclocks. As pointed out by Nordic Hardware, Zotac posted a screenshot of its Firestorm software overclocking a 3080 to 1,933MHz, with a 40 percent boost to the fan speed. So it appears Nvidia's AIBs are going to be aggressive with at least some of their custom models.
