Graphics cards (particularly from NVIDIA) seem to be moving in a direction that could very soon result in air conditioners/central cooling becoming a core requirement of running a high end PC. NVIDIA's latest Ada Lovelace GPUs have been confirmed to feature a TDP of 600W for some SKUs and even its upcoming RTX 3090 Ti custom graphics cards will sip close to 480W from the wall. A TDP of this level usually means that the PSU will need to be capable of handling power spikes in the range of 600-700W - which is mind-boggling.
Custom MSI, EVGA and Colorful RTX 3090 Ti GPUs will sip close to 500 watts from the wall and come in 3.5 slot designs
We will go the following RTX 3090 Ti custom editions: the MSI RTX 3090 SUPRIM X, EVGA RTX 3090 Ti FTW Ultra and Colorful RTX 3090 Ti BattleAx Deluxe. All of these cards have been leaked courtesy of Videocardz (here and here). The one thing all three have in common is a TDP of at least 450W.
Once the Ada Lovelace series is launched, you are looking at a high-end gaming PC dumping close to 1000 watts of heat into any room it is in - which, if you live in hotter climates, will almost certainly require active air conditioning of some sort. The good news is, if you live in colder climates, you certainly don't need a space heater anymore - your PC will do just fine.
EVGA RTX 3090 Ti FTW Ultra
EVGA's FTW series is a fan favorite and they are known for selecting the best dies out there but this is one thicc boi. It features a 3.5 slot design - which will almost certainly leave a GPU support sleeve if you want to avoid sagging issues - and a power connector that has been placed at the far end of the GPU.
Colorful RTX 3090 Ti
Colorful appears to be planning at least three RTX 3090 Ti models, namely the BattleAx Deluxe, Vulcan, and Neptune. Their size is a bit more modest than COlorful and is also packaged in a more uniform fashion. The Power connector is on the side as you would expect but this is still a 3.5 slot design.
MSI RTX 3090 SUPRIM X
The piece de resistance of MSI's RTX 3000 series lineup, the RTX 3090 Ti SUPRIM X is a 3.5 slot design that features a whopping 480W of TDP. Coupled with GDDR6X vRAM and an insanely high clock rate of 1965MHz, this face-melting (literally) level of performance is going to be available in a massive 2.1 KG package. Of course, with all three graphics cards you are going to get a metric ton of performance and NVIDIA's cards are going to be overclocked out of the gate. With clock rates close to 2 GHz, these are easily going to be the performance kings - at least until Ada Lovelace comes around.
