Back in 2023. a few months after the RTX 40 series had launched, speculation over an RTX Titan coming out in that generation was sky-high. Ultimately, it was never released, which only built up the myths of this GPU that has since slowly become less and less mysterious through prototype leaks. One of those prototypes is in the hands of community legend Roman 'der8auer' Hartung, who's benchmarked it previously, but he's now finally taken it apart to show us what's inside.
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We first see how the card is built from the outside; it's similar to a Founder's Edition RTX 5090 where the entire shroud looks like one big heatsink. When looking at it from the top, you can see through the card entirely since there's no PCB or anything else in the way like in a conventional GPU. There's a fan on either side of the heatsink, but also a smaller third fan in the middle that's only visible at certain angles.
(Image credit: der8auer on YouTube)
Der8auer remarks how unique this design is, and would've been for its time had it actually launched before the RTX 5090, like it was clearly planned to at one point. The card is gigantic, feeling almost comically large in our host's hands, since it's a monstrous quad-slot design.
This can be confirmed by just looking toward the back, which houses the vertically stacked I/O in the form of 3x Display Port 1.4a and 1x HDMI 2.1 — these are actually soldered onto the mainboard as you'll see later, unlike how the RTX 5090 FE handles them via a daughterboard. Anyhow, unscrewing the I/O shield here is the first step of getting inside the card.
Image credit: der8auer on YouTube Image credit: der8auer on YouTube
Once removed, you can see a parting line where der8auer wedges a screwdriver that separates the side plate previously held by the I/O shield. The side plate eventually comes off, and it has heatpipes running through the back with thermal pads placed to make contact with components on the PCB like the memory and VRM controller.
Image credit: der8auer on YouTube Image credit: der8auer on YouTube Image credit: der8auer on YouTube
That brings us to the main attraction, the actual PCB, which is mounted on the side of the card, similar to the RTX 4090 Ti prototype we looked at a while ago. The PCB has 12x 2GB GDDR7 memory modules on the top side that's visible right now, with 12x more on the back, for a combined total of 48GB VRAM.
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