According to the German site Igor's Lab this thing is a brute. It’s longer, thicker, heavier and built like a mining rig’s fever dream. A three-slot slab of metal and fins with three 8-pin connectors staring back at you. One more than AMD ever dared to ship. And if you think it’s some third-party experiment, think again. The design screams AMD: red aluminium accents, an angular backplate and the unapologetically harsh “RDNA 3 meets brutalism” look.

The industry always suspected AMD once toyed with a true RTX 4090 killer, maybe a souped-up Navi 31 or an even larger, never-born chip. This cooler certainly wasn’t meant for an ordinary RX 7900 XTX. At 33cm long, spanning three slots, and demanding three 8-pins, it was overkill and would have cost an arm and a leg. Instead of throwing down with Nvidia’s monstrosity, AMD waved the white flag with marketing about efficiency and price-performance. It was basically too hot, loud and expensive.

Digging into the build reveals hints of what might have been. A massive copper block under the shroud, split to separately handle GPU and VRAM thermals. A larger baseplate than the RX 7900 XTX, suggesting a bigger or more extreme die.

The triple power input hints at a 400W-plus target, something more Titan than Radeon. Maybe this was a stepping stone to a water-cooled reference card that never escaped the lab. Or maybe it was just an elaborate bandage for an engineering headache.

This is the dead letter office of GPU design, where ambitions were boxed and forgotten. Perhaps it was destined to be an “RX 7950 XTX” or even “RX 7990 XTX”. AMD clearly flirted with gigantism and then walked away.

Nvidia, for all its sins, shipped the ludicrous RTX 4090 and lived with the consequences. AMD chose restraint. And now this triple-slot cooler survives only as a relic, a silent reminder of a fight they never picked.