Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “A Quick Look at the EVGA FTW3 Ultra 3090Ti”.
Listen this thing’s so ridiculous. I couldn’t even wait for the unboxing i’ve already unboxed it. This is the evga 3090 ti what is nvidia thinking. This is basically the end of the product cycle and they’re coming out with the 3090 ti it’s a little controversial because they teased it at new year’s. What day is it again? Look at the evga ftw3 ultra, because this is the only one in stock that i could find, but uh paid msrp, which is like 2200., because this is a bin.
Yes, well yeah i mean technically, it is a bin of a bin of a bin. The 30 90 ti is basically the 30 90 on steroids. There’S the two compute units that they left locked have been unlocked and they’ve also juiced the clock speed. So that means this thing is going to consume 200 watts above and beyond what a 30 90 would consume.
That seems a little excessive. They recommend an 850 watt power supply, i’m going to recommend a thousand watt power supply. You need a thousand watt power supply to use this gpu with a reasonable system if you’re rocking something like a threadripper you’re gon na need something beyond a thousand watts we’re getting into territory where you know most american homes. Each a circuit breaker is only 15 amps at 120 volts, so we’re entering the territory where you can plug in your computer and that’s pretty much the only thing that plugs into the breaker.
With this it’s four slots and uh, it is a little ridiculous. One thing they’ve done differently: this generation is worry seriously about gpu sag, so in addition to having the you know back plate screwed into the pcb, that’s all well and good and actually sort of becomes mechanically bonded to the back plate and the support here. So the back plate is actually attached here near where the connectors are, which is for displayport 1.4 and one hdmi 2.1 b as well as here.
The support here acts like a triangle supporting the full length of the gpu, which really helps it not sag, but also in the box. You get not one but two anti-sag solutions. The first one is this: this is a retention bracket for attaching to some select chassis.
So this is a solid piece of metal that will allow you to if you have the right case, there’s a qr code there you can use this bracket, but the other more genius one is basically a t-clip and a wire. So i set it up in my uh intel w3175x based workstation system, it’s a 28 core monster system and i screwed the cable into one of the top fans and then there’s a t-slot here on the edge of the card. So it slides right into the edge of the card, and then that supports the card from above. It’S definitely the card that batman would use.
You notice in the batman movies that uh in the bat cave all the desks were suspended from the ceiling. Like a bat hanging upside down, that was a designer that did that it’s like it’s actually very wildly impractical to have your desks dangling from the ceiling, because there’s no friction that would have to be absurdly heavy, because when you push on the desk or you do Something or whatever it’ll want to twist and then you have to have cables running diagonally. It’S just it’d be wildly impractical to build a new youtube studio where you have your desks hanging from the ceiling because it was cool in the bat cave. But i digress. The evga aesthetic here is pretty strong and we have a total of seven heat pipes that you can see at the in the rear edge of the card.
We also have a four pin fan header, as well as a 50 50 rgb header. In addition, the the power connector, but there’s extra pins stuffed in there, but the cable that they include, which is a power breakout, cable, similar to the original rtx 3090, is quite a bit different. There’S an extra power plug there’s three, this time, not too, because hey extra 200 watts, but the extra pins that go along the top there’s nothing in this connector to use that.
So that’s for future improvement reserved for future use kind of a thing. I think that i actually intend for this little tiny connector to be able to carry a lot of different wattages and the extra connection on the top of that is to sense. You know the 4000 series cars basically, which are going to require a small fusion reactor.
So the breakout cable is, of course, reasonably high quality, also included in the box. You’Ve got a couple of zip ties. A couple of evga zip ties to help you with that.
I do like that. They’Ve located the power connector on the end of the card, and it’s smaller and this card isn’t ridiculously long. The fact that this card isn’t ridiculously long will help you with air flow. In your case, plus also, you could have a right angle, adapter or something like that.
I’M sure that somebody will come out with that accessory that will come off of the end and go you know sort of that way, but as it is, these pigtails are long enough, which again the original 3090 nvidia saved 22 cents by not making the wires a Reasonable length good job, nvidia evga again, they know what they’re doing this can be hidden in behind your motherboard tray so that you’ve got these nice braided cables. You don’t have to worry about it. Evga knows what they’re doing you know how there’s a regular and an oc switch on a lot of cards. This one’s got three three positions on that switch. It’S oc performance and normal. It comes on performance, which is reasonable. Oc uh will result in an audibly loud card, but you have an overclock profile, so you can save that now. I wouldn’t recommend that you adjust the power slider for this to squeeze even more out of it.
Trust me evga has squeezed all of the silicon out that they possibly can. I do think it’s interesting as somebody who has a founder’s edition 3090, who has also had to return it for warranty service, because the gddr6x melted. I do think it’s interesting that the founders edition of the 3090 ti they actually went to the trouble of moving the gddr6 all to the same side of the pcb as the gpu. You got to stop and think about this for a second.
This is exactly the same layout. It’S exactly the same silicon it’s just later in the production cycle, so they can, they can squeeze a little bit more out of it. It’S actually pretty common.
You know we have the the tweaked versions that are just slightly better quality. Silicon, these have probably been collecting in bins for a while, even with the gpu shortages, because you know nvidia’s not dom they’re, they’re they’re doing these kinds of things. In the background, it doesn’t really necessarily make sense to do a completely new pcb layout. If you can avoid it well, in this case, they’re dumping, another 200 watts, so at least the power stages are going to have to be reworked, evga, definitely leaned on their engineering prowess. To come up with this card, which the pcb is the full length.
But i couldn’t help but notice those details on the founders edition card. I was telling you about. They moved all the gddr6 from the back. So all the stuff that gets hot is on the front and evga already knew that with their card. They already knew that with their 3090 and they’ve, just elevated, that on the 30, 90 ti to the state of the art. So i like this version of the 3090ti, and i don’t really care for the founders edition of the 30 90 because of the aforementioned problems. The founders edition of the 30 90 is a three slot card. It’S a little less than a three slot card. The 30 90 tr ti is squarely in four slot card territory, so these are enormous, enormous cards, something to keep in mind for your build. Let’S talk performance so, as you might imagine, i’ve already been off to the races with the performance on these cards.
It is five to ten percent faster in general speaking in generalities here it is five to ten percent faster for 200 ish, more watts of power usage. This is the fastest ampere card. You can get for pretty much everything except floating point: 64., floating point: 64, shouldn’t matter to you unless you’re a research, scientist or someone that cares about floating point 64.. If you want to run tensor operations on this, pretty much everything but floating point 64 seems to basically be unrestricted. So if you’re thinking about this or something like an a40, if you’re not running it in the data center, you can get away with running this. Now the a100, of course, is going to run circles around this for floating point 64, because the a100 is completely unrestricted for floating point 64.
If that kind of thing is important to you, but for everything else, this is pretty much unmatched, because 600 watts in a single card, far and away beyond what you get in the in the data center right now in a single gpu. So this is the absolute maximum that this platform is ever going to be able to offer. I don’t think it’s a particularly good deal. Don’T think it’s particularly wise investment.
You remember. We are at the end of a gpu cycle here: uh world war iii, global global disease situation. Notwithstanding a new generation of cards is inbound. It is not unreasonable to expect that the new generation of cards will offer this level of performance, probably for around a thousand dollars, twelve hundred dollars, maybe less uh in in the next generation.
So if you can get by with something that’s not two thousand dollars, you could buy, say you know a 700 to a thousand dollar graphics card now and then sell that one when the next ones come out, for let’s say three hundred dollars conservatively and then put The other thousand dollars, or a thousand plus three hundred dollars toward the next generation gpu and you will be better off because you’ll have a newer generation gpu that probably uses dramatically less power than 600 watts and uh probably faster as well. But if you have to have the absolute fastest thing that there is right now, that’s this oh – and i almost forgot – picked this one up at retail, but i’ve also got an msi supreme x, 3090 ti coming in to take a look at that as well. So maybe we can do maybe we can do a head-to-head with that, because i really do like the msi supreme x, design, the 3080 and the 30 90. i’ve got both of those those are really solid cards. So if you see that one and not this one yeah you’re, probably all right, i wonder this is level one i’m signing out. You can find me the level one forum you .