While replacing the stock heat sink of their GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card with a water block, a forum member over at HardwareLuxx made a rather interesting observation. The GPU die had two labels with the top one struck off. The bottom one marks the chip as a GA102-300-A1 which is technically the die on which the RTX 3090 is based. However, the above marking indicates that this part might have become a GA102-250-A1 which as per rumors was going to be the RTX 3080 Ti before the specifications were revised.
The GPU was manufactured in early December 2020 which falls in line with the earlier rumors of an RTX 3080 Ti launch in Jan 2021. We’re likely looking at an early sample that was reassigned to become an RTX 3090. Either way, the revised RTX 3080 Ti is slated to launch in Mid-May with roughly the same core count and bus width as the 3090. The memory, however, has been halved to 12GB GDDR6X which is honestly a shame considering that both the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT come with a 16GB memory buffer.
