I'm not above a little derivative foolishness of a bleak monday morning. And so I asked the AI painter de jour, DALL-E mini, to help visualise what an 800W RTX 4090 might look like should the green team go all out. I think DALL-E has actually nailed the cooling array, so I'm going to steal it and see if I can get a design credit from Jen-Hsun.
We're edging ever closer to the launch of the new Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards, yet we don't really have a lot to go on in terms of what they're going to look like. Or even really how they're going to be specced out.
There were rumours a while back of the green team testing AD102 boards with 800W total board power (TBP), and though that is unlikely to actually appear in a release graphics card—at least not for the consumer market—I kinda wanted to see what one might look like. The DALL-E design features a dual-fan cooling array on top, with a supplementary 120mm fan pushing air down the length of the PCB, presumably to an exhaust vent pointing towards the back of the PC.
That would result in a very chunky, maybe five-slot graphics card design, but it sure would be able to house a heatsink capable of keeping such a hot and heavy Ada Lovelace GPU cooled. But yeah, 'heavy' might very well be the watchword here if 'efficiency' certainly isn't; you're going to want a support bracket in there, I'd wager.
Thankfully, the latest rumours suggest the top-end card of the next Nvidia generation, the RTX 4090 will be a 450W board. That is still pretty ludicrous, considering the GeForce RTX 3090 was a 350W card.
Yeah, I know the RTX 3090 Ti is a 450W card, too, but that is also a ludicrous board.
Some updates. RTX 4090, AD102-300, 16384FP32, 384bit 21Gbps 24G GDDR6X,RTX 4080, AD103-300, 10240FP32, 256bit (?18Gbps 16G GDDR6?), RTX 4070, AD104-275, 7168FP32, 160bit 18Gbps GDDR6 10G. And DO NOT expect a lower MSRP.June 23, 2022
Anyways, once we'd established what an super over-specced card would look like I then questioned what would be going on under the hood when such a GPU might require its own discrete power supply.
This is one hell of blurry cable hell prediction right here…
In order to be even-handed with regards the artificial intelligences involved I also let Nvidia's own GauGan2 AI Art tool have a go at creating us a over-powered 800W RTX 4090 design. To be fair, it doesn't have an 'object' setting, and is better suited to creating landscape images.
Still, this feels like a tortured digital soul desperate to be loved. Or at least taken for a wee day trip to the beach.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | GPU | CUDA cores | Memory | Memory bus | Memory speed | TBP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 4090 | AD102-300 | 16,384 | 24GB GDDR6X | 384-bit | 21Gbps | 450W |
| GeForce RTX 4080 | AD103-300 | 10,240 | 16GB GDDR6 | 256-bit | 18Gbps | 420W |
| GeForce RTX 4070 | AD104-275 | 7,168 | 10GB GDDR6 | 160-bit | 18Gbps | 300W |
