The reality of mounting e-waste is just one more thing that keeps me up at night—though every now and then, such a nightmare spits out a real gem. One Reddit user shared that after recently moving, they went rummaging through a bin full of junked computer parts, and pulled out not just a surprisingly decent graphics card, but something genuinely special.
Over the years, we've reported on the graphical powerhouse that never was, the Nvidia RTX 4090 Ti. Reportedly cancelled, one lucky poster apparently saved a prototype model from landfill back in November 2024 (via VideoCardz). You know what they say, one person's trash is another's GPU—wait, haven't we been here before? I'm about to go full Danny DeVito and debut my refuse-themed, musical wrestling persona, the Queen of Slop.
Jokes aside, what surfaced on Reddit last year appeared to be a mostly complete prototype, with both the MASSIVE cooler plus the card itself. I say 'appeared' because the Reddit post including the original photo uploads of the prototype, has since been scrubbed. But fear not! This is far from the final twist in the tale.
Enter tech testing YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, who have more recently got their hands on the fabled GPU. After plenty of partial sightings like some kind of cryptid, Gamers Nexus not only benchmarked the prototype of what is thought to be the long lost RTX 4090 Ti, but also shared a teardown of the funky, chunky card.
Gamers Nexus first highlighted the hefty GPU's somewhat unusual construction, drawing attention to the front, back, and middle fan placements. This not only sucks airflow straight through the card, but also necessitates a more discretely placed PCB. The board in question is a hefty bit of kit too, running along the belly of this absolute beast—and it is a beast, measuring 80 mm in width. Getting up close and personal with the PCB reveals a densely packed hotbed of tech, with the central GPU crowded by memory and multiple layers of VRAM.
The otherwise pretty unwieldy cooler impressed during thermal benchmarking, keeping the GPU at around 46 °C, and more than 20 degrees cooler than the actually released Founder's Edition RTX 4090.
But let's get to what we're all really here for—the gaming test. The prototype averaged 62 fps for Black Myth: Wukong at 4K with FSR Quality and ray tracing enabled. This was comparable to the retail card Gamers Nexus also tested, the Nvidia RTX 4090 Cybertank, which averaged 65 fps. The gap between the two cards soon widened though; in Dying Light 2 at 4K, the prototype averaged 82.3 fps while the retail model averaged 91.6, and in Dragon's Dogma 2 at 4K with ray tracing at max settings, the prototype averaged 76.3 fps while the retail model averaged 84.5.
Though not an awful performance by any means, it's an unsurprising performance gap for a somewhat unrefined prototype graphics card—especialy without easily accessible, specific drivers to get the most out of the hardware.
It's always interesting to glimpse a road not taken in tech, though the big question mark remains why Nvidia never pushed this prototype into full production. Was the cooler simply too thick for this world? Who can say. What I do know for certain is that time marches on, e-waste is still not a solved problem, and that the reign of the comparatively svelte RTX 5090 is upon us.
