NVIDIA header image

Rumor: Nvidia RTX 3090 ‘Ampere’ Founders Edition GPU to have a starting price of $1399 USD


Yesterday, I shared one leak/rumor on the pricing of some of the Custom GPU models from the Colorful brand. Now we are hearing rumors that the reference ‘Founders Edition/FE’ RTX 3090 GPU might cost a minimum of $1399, though expect a premium of 100 USD as well, which should make the Founders Edition card cost $1499 USD. Nvidia has done this in the past with the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition GPU.

This latest rumor comes from a Chiphell forum user Wjm47196 who has a strong track record of leaks/rumors in the past which mostly turned out to be true. According to him, and as mentioned above, NVIDIA’s upcoming Ampere GeForce RTX 3090 card is going to feature a starting price of $1399 USD.

The previous flagship Turing RTX 2080 Ti GPU had a price tag of $1199 USD for the Founders Edition, which means the new RTX 3090 card will cost $200 more. The Turing RTX 2080 Ti GPU also had variants starting at $999 USD, with some of the custom AIB Models costing up to $1999 USD. NVIDIA charged a $200 USD premium for the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Ti variant.

There appears to be a price bump of at least 40% if we compare the minimum base price of the RTX 3090 GPU with RTX 2080 Ti, whereas the Founders Edition pricing would see a 25% bump. The reason behind this price jump is simple. GDDR6X memory is brand new and is likely expensive to manufacture, and we have heard rumors of a 24GB variant for the RTX 3090 card as well, which is double the Memory frame buffer of 11 GB GDDR6 found on the RTX 2080 Ti. This new GDDR6X memory interface also sports higher clock speeds for higher bandwidth, along with a wider bus width too. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 will make use of the GA102 GPU core, and we can expect a 40-50% performance jump over the RTX 2080 Ti.

Nvidia appears to have priced these new GDDR6X Ampere variants at a higher cost margin than the Turing lineup. So expect some of the custom AIB cards to cost north of $1500+ USD. Nvidia is hosting a Geforce Special Event on September 1st, and we expect the company to announce the next-gen Ampere Gaming GPUs.

Stay tuned for more!