The first reference PCB diagram of NVIDIA’s AD102 graphics core has surfaced, courtesy of our German friend Igor. This board will be paired with the Ada Lovelace dies to power the Founders Edition cards as well as certain AIB models. As already reported several times, this PCB has been designed to tolerate up to 600W of power without, well, burning your house down. It will feature up to 24 voltage converters, with three paired together to make one phase.
The memory will max out at 24GB (of GDDR6X), indicating that NVIDIA is still planning on pairing the RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM via a 384-bit bus, and the RTX 4080 coming with either 12GB or 16GB of GDDR6X across a 320-bit bus. The RTX 4070 will most likely be coupled with 16GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus. We also have to remember that the RTX 4090 will pack as much as 96MB of L2 cache and the RTX 4080 somewhere between 80-88MB, so the effective bandwidth will be much higher. Overall, there is space for 12 packages, each of which can hold 1GB or 2GB GDDR6X modules. The memory will be paired with four VRM phases.
The other interesting bit is that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will literally be a test run for the upcoming RTX 4080/4090 SKUs. The boards and coolers used for the last Ampere GPU will be compatible with the AD102, the die powering the RTX 4080/4090. Speaking of heatsinks, it’s being reported that NVIDIA will leverage a triple-fan cooler for the Founders Edition design to cool the 600W GPUs. Board partners are set to adopt 3.5-slot heatsinks, with plenty of 2 kg+ graphics cards.
