Nvidia’s Next-Gen Reference Cooler May Cost $150 on its Own!

Towards the end of the last week, we saw images appear online that claimed to be from one of the proposed Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card designs. Quite a substantial bit of news as there is clearly a lot of hype and speculation surrounding their next entries in the GPU market. Chief among the interest, however, was the rather unusual (and certainly out of the ordinary) cooling design.

In a report via TechPowerUp, however, if you think that this new reference design is going to potentially see reduced graphics card pricing, you may set to be significantly disappointed!

Nvidia Next-Gen Reference Cooler

Based on the images, it seems pretty clear that Nvidia is going for a radical new cooling design with at least their 3080 graphics card that will see the cooling aspect moved to the top of the GPU as part of a dual-fan/twin-heatsink design. As you might expect, however, this is certainly a lot more complicated than their prior ‘reference’ designs, and, based on the complexity, it has been suggested that this component alone could cost around $150 to produce.

Now, of course, Nvidia will be mass producing these and, as such, it’s unlikely that it’s specifically costing them $150 a pop. It does, however, raise alarm bells that their next-gen graphics cards featuring this cooling design will come with a pretty notable price increase when compared to the launch of their prior 20XX ‘Founders Edition’ GPUs.

What Do We Think?

Many believe that with the cost of this design, Nvidia may limit it to the ‘top 3’ ‘Founders Edition’ designs from the 30XX series. In other words, probably the 3080, the 3080 ti and potentially the Titan (albeit, we have heard rumors that Nvidia may rebrand this GPU the 3090).

With them expected to formally announce their latest GPU series within the next couple of months, however, we clearly don’t have long to wait before we find out for certain. If you are hoping that these new graphics cards might come at more affordable prices, however, it seems that if they’re packing these coolers, the chances are incredibly slim!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!