Astronomical Ada Lovelace power draw rumours confirmed by GeForce RTX 4090 sample drawing up to 616 Watts under load

Several pre-launch rumours predicted that Nvidia's Ada Lovelace graphics cards would be overclocking-friendly thanks to the near two-node shift from Ampere. An early GeForce RTX 4090 sample boosted up to 3.0 GHz while running 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme. The graphics card has done it again, this time in the MSI Kombuster stress test, while drawing about 425 Watts. Twitter leaker HXL says that the graphics card used a "water chiller", and that's how it could hit such clocks.

However, the GeForce RTX 4090 can also draw an eye-watering 616 Watts of power under some workloads, as demonstrated by a second screenshot on Bilibili. While it isn't nearly as high as initial power draw assumptions, users will likely require a high-quality PSU with adequate overcurrent and overvoltage protections to go with their shiny new RTX 4090. All it will take is one transient power spike for the PSU to go belly up and potentially take the entire system with it.

Unfortunately, the GPU temperature was obscured, so there's no telling how long one can sustain it without long-term damage. Then again, thermals shouldn't be much of a problem, given how Nvidia and AIBs have overengineered the cooling solution for the GeForce RTX 4090. It'll be interesting to see how far overclockers can push Ada Lovelace with custom water loops and other advanced cooling techniques.

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