News outlet CRN reported that Gigabyte has retired the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G announced back in September of last year. The product page for the graphics card is no longer available, which confirms CRN's report.
Gigabyte's sudden plans to cancel the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G will certainly put its server partners in a tight situation. Although Nvidia has a formidable Ampere compute graphics card in the shape of the A100, many vendors preferred to roll with the GeForce RTX 3090 due to the latter's better price-to-performance ratio. The A100 retails for close to $10,000 while the GeForce RTX 3090 can be found for $1,499 on a good day.
The GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G was a great option for vendors to put together budget server offerings because the graphics card met all the requirements of a compute graphics card. It features the blower design, only occupied two PCI slots and it also came equipped with 24GB of high-speed GDDR6X memory, which is a big plus for deep learning workloads.
It's plausible that Gigabyte might have received some sort of warning or recommendation from Nvidia to preemptively ax the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G. Word was probably getting around town that manufacturers were opting for the GeForce RTX 3090 instead of the more expensive A100 for their data center solutions. In fact, Nvidia discourages the deployment of GeForce and Titan graphics cards in a data center setting. The aforementioned products don't come with the same level of features as Nvidia's data center offerings, such as an extended warranty, enterprise support, certification for data center applications and a longer lifecycle. They also come with a smaller price tag.
Now that the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G has officially reached the end-of-life (EOL) status, vendors will have to look for another viable solution. Luckily, Gigabyte's GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G wasn't the only GeForce RTX 3090 with a blower-design on the market. Asus and MSI also put out similar designs. Heck, even South Korean manufacturer Emtek's GeForce RTX 3090 Blower Edition is a legit alternative if push comes to shove.
