I’m not above a little distracted folly from a dreary Monday morning. And so I asked the AI painter de jour, DALL-E mini (opens in new tab)to help visualize what a 800W RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) could look like when the green team goes all out. I think DALL-E really nailed the cooling range, so I’m going to steal it and see if I can get a design credit from Jen-Hsun.
We’re getting closer and closer to launching the new Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards, but we don’t really have much to do in terms of what they’ll look like. Or even really how they will be specified.
A while back there were rumors that the Green team was testing AD102 boards with a total power output of 800W (TBP), and while it’s unlikely to show up in a release graphics card – at least not for the consumer market – I wanted a little see what one might look like. The DALL-E design features a dual-fan cooling array on the top, with an additional 120mm fan that pushes air down the circuit board, presumably to an exhaust vent pointing toward the back of the PC.
That would result in a very thick, maybe five-slot graphics card design, but it could certainly house a heatsink capable of keeping such a hot and heavy Ada Lovelace GPU cooled. But yes, ‘heavy’ could be the watchword here if ‘efficiency’ certainly isn’t; you’ll want a support brace there I bet.
Fortunately, the latest rumors suggest that the top-end card of the next generation Nvidia, the RTX 4090, will be a 450W board. That’s still pretty ridiculous considering the GeForce RTX 3090 was a 350W card.
Yes, I know the RTX 3090 Ti is also a 450W card, but that’s a ridiculous board too.
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 suggested retail price.June 23, 2022
Anyway, once we established what a super over-spec card would look like, I wondered what would happen under the hood if such a GPU needed its own discrete power supply.
This is one hell of blurry cable hell forecast right here…
To be fair regarding the artificial intelligences involved, I also gave Nvidia’s own GauGan2 AI Art tool a chance to create a powerful 800W RTX 4090 design for us. To be fair, it has no ‘object’ setting and is better suited for taking landscape images.
Still, this feels like a tortured digital soul desperate for love. Or at least taken for a short day at the beach.
| GPU | CUDA cores | Memory | Memory bus | Memory Speed | TBP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 4090 | AD102-300 | 16,384 | 24GB GDDR6X | 384-bit | 21 Gbps | 450W |
| GeForce RTX 4080 | AD103-300 | 10.240 | 16GBGDDR6 | 256-bit | 18 Gbps | 420W |
| GeForce RTX 4070 | AD104-275 | 7.168 | 10GBGDDR6 | 160-bit | 18 Gbps | 300W |