Galax's GeForce RTX 4090 20th Anniversary Edition With Hidden Connector Breaks Cover
Whatever the cause, Galax is using this anniversary as an opportunity to produce some seriously fancy hardware, including a ludicrously-fast PCIe 5.0 SSD with active cooling, DDR5 memory clocked at a scorching 7600 MT/s, and of course, a GeForce RTX 4090 with a gargantuan 3.5-slot cooler that sports three fans arranged in a curious fashion.
Folks familiar with NVIDIA's Founders Edition GPUs from the last couple of generations of GeForce cards will no doubt find Galax's design on this 20th-Anniversary card to be reminiscent of NVIDIA's own, although where NVIDIA only uses a single fan on each side, Galax has two in the front and one in the back. This "flow-through" cooler design has proven to be very effective on the Founders Edition cards, and we expect that it works well here, too.
Arguably the most notable thing about this graphics card is that the 12VHPWR connector isn't on the top where you'll find it on most GPUs, but instead actually on the bottom, closer to the PCIe edge connector. It's attached to the end of the actual graphics card, embedded in the heatsink and covered by a removable part of the backplate which also holds the rear-facing fan.
Given the emphasis on aesthetics for this card, this makes a lot of sense; it'll put the GPU's 12VHPWR connector in a similar location to the 24-pin ATX power connectors as well as the motherboard's SATA plugs. That means less visible cable clutter toward the window side of the PC, allowing for cleaner-looking builds. It'll certainly be more of a pain to hook up, though, and all-but-disallows the use of the quadruple-8-pin adapters that are commonplace on RTX 4090 cards.
In other words, you'd better bring an ATX12V 3.0-compliant power supply for this bad boy. Of course, the GPU is out of reach for most of us; besides the price of a limited-edition GeForce RTX 4090 card in general, this specific model has only been shipped to overclockers so far, like CornerJack, the source of the photos in this post. The company hasn't announced plans to sell this model, but the other 20th-Anniversary hardware goes on sale November 11th in the Asia Pacific region.
