It looks like PC DIY enthusiasts should brace themselves for further price shocks as the first European listings for custom Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti designs have started to emerge. At the official launch of the Nvidia reference GeForce RTX 3090 Ti earlier in the month, Nvidia avoided sharing any pricing or availability dates. Still, the pair of MSI custom designs we have gone up for sale in Switzerland for the equivalent of $4,000 or thereabouts.
Above, you can see some screenshots of the retail listings from the aptly named Swiss etailer Top Preise. If you click left and right, you can switch between listings for the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X, MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Gaming X Trio, and their non-Ti brethren from the same outlet. These price uplifts are pretty astonishing, with this reseller adding up to a 66% premium on the new halo cards from MSI and Nvidia.
| MSI GeForce model | RTX 3090 Suprim X | RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X | RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio | RTX 3090 Ti Gaming X Trio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Swiss price | CHf2,209 | CHf3,678 | CHf2,569 | CHf 3,595 |
US equivalent | $2,416 | $4,022 | $2,809 | $3,932 |
Retail price uplift | NA | 66% | NA | 40% |
The upgrade going from the GeForce RTX 3090 to RTX 3090 Ti might be nice to have but paying this much for the only modestly improved (on paper) Ti would likely be mostly for bragging rights. There is some hope that these prices could be early placeholder prices, but the untidy sums suggest otherwise.
As we covered at the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition launch, the new GeForce champ offers a minor bump in CUDA core count, using a fully-enabled GA102 GPU, giving it 84 SMs (streaming multiprocessors) and 10,752 CUDA cores. The 'plain old' RTX 3090 has 82 SMs and 10,496 CUDA cores - not much of a downgrade in percentage terms. In addition, memory bandwidth should be improved, with Nvidia upgrading the 24GB GDDR6X to 21Gbps, with denser ICs, and halving the memory chip count for more direct cooling. At the time of writing, we still don't have Nvidia confirmed core clocks for the RTX 3090 Ti, nor these MSI custom cards.
As a footnote, it is exciting to see this latest retailer spill given that only days ago, multiple outlets said their sources had alerted them to a halt on GeForce RTX 3090 Ti production due to issues with both hardware and firmware. Before this rumor hit the fan, we comfortably accepted Nvidia's guidance to get further first-hand details about the RTX 3090 Ti later this month.
