New PG136C PCB for the new RTX 3090 Ti

Nvidia's Ampere architecture is very popular among gamers and miners alike, and the previous top model, the Geforce RTX 3090, has led our performance index since its release. But with the Geforce RTX 3090 Ti, a successor model with even higher performance is available. Now Nvidia has filed a patent for a new PCB that goes very well with the upcoming flagship. Read more about this below.

Nvidia's Geforce RTX 3090 Ti is the new flagship that no one asked for and should be out by now. Rumors circulated several times that production had been discontinued or at least interrupted. But now Nvidia has filed a new patent, which is said to include the new PCB of the Geforce RTX 3090 Ti.

Previous models of the RTX 3090 were either sold as a Founders Edition with a V-cut PCB (PG136) or as a reference model with two conventional power connectors as a PG132 PCB. In addition, there are the numerous custom PCBs of the AIBs, which of course are not patented by Nvidia. The newly emerged PCB is labeled PG136C, so there is either a new version of PCBs for the regular Geforce RTX 3090 or more likely a modified version for the Geforce RTX 3090 Ti.

While the cooler between the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti looks relatively identical and can probably continue to be used with minor modifications, the PCB needs to be changed profoundly. The new GDDR6X memory chips with 2 GB capacity can be accommodated on the front and the power supply has to be converted from the proprietary 12-pin connector to the new 12+4-pin connector according to the PCI Gen 5 specification.

The filing of the patent shows that Nvidia is finally done with the design process and likely had production issues beforehand. Apart from problems with the new memory chips, problems with the V-BIOS of the cards or the power supply, which already has to deal with 450 watts as standard, would also be conceivable.

In other news, Nvidia's youngest entry-level graphics card, the Geforce RTX 3050, has been on the market for almost two weeks, but the price and availability situation isn’t really picking up steam.

When it was released on January 27th, the Geforce RTX 3050 was only available well above the recommended retail price of 320 dollars due to poor availability, and while the slightly longer available Geforce RTX 3080 12GB from the upper class is slowly leveling off. The entry-level model is still only available for a short time at somewhat more humane prices.

The Geforce RTX 3050 was recently occasionally listed for less than 500 dollars, but only very temporarily, while there are only comparatively few listings at retailers due to the poor availability find. Currently, the prices only start again from 440 dollars for the Palit Geforce RTX 3050 StormX, currently, as the cheapest model with one listing, followed by the Asus Phoenix Geforce RTX 3050 with a listing for 430 dollars.