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NVIDIA teases its next-generation RTX 3000 GPUs

You can look forward to 12-pin power connectors and new cooling.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA is expected to give us more details about its next generation of video cards, the RTX 3000 series, at a special GeForce event on September 1. To tide us over, the company has released a short technical video which gives us a glimpse at its new GPU designs — likely the enormous leaked RTX 3090 card — and offers up some details about its plans. The RTX 3000 cards are expected to be the consumer debut of NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, which first appeared in the expensive A100 GPU for datacenters.

While NVIDIA isn’t giving us specific details about its new cards yet, the company has confirmed leaks that suggested it was moving towards as 12-pin power connection. That’s slimmer than using two 8-pin connectors, which the company’s high-end cards currently rely on, and it gives the company more room for additional hardware around the GPU. The technical video also discusses an improved focus on cooling, likely because the new architecture runs far hotter than its existing cards. The supposed RTX 3090 leak on Twitter (above) shows a card with a massive cooler, which will reportedly take up three PCIe slots.