Power-hungry Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti may require a 1,200 W PSU to offer double Ampere performance

Some interesting chatter between two well-known tech leakers has resulted in a morsel of information about the upcoming RTX 40 series of graphics cards from Nvidia. Tipster @harukaze5719 was commenting about the Nvidia “Lovelace” boards and Intel’s future Raptor Lake series, opining “Expecting i9-13900K + RTX 4090 Ti recommend PSU at least 1,000 W GOLD”. However, it wasn’t long before another tipster chimed in, with Greymon55 responding that 1,000 W “is not enough”.

The same source has frequently posted about the RTX 40 series, including sharing the promising statement that the Lovelace boards would offer “double performance” of the GeForce RTX 3090. Of course, to do that and utilize 18,432 CUDA cores at the same time requires a lot of power, which Greymon55 reckons will be 600 W for either the GeForce RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti. Which model is not known (it may even be a different card) but the leaker claims it is 600 W for a reference board rather than a custom unit.

If true, this will mean builders will need to be looking at 1,200 W PSUs to efficiently power their systems, offering enough headroom for peak GPU performance while keeping all the other parts of the computer fired up. While 600 W sounds incredible, when put into context it actually becomes more than credible. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has a TDP of 250 W, the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 go to 300 W, and the upcoming RTX 3090 Ti sits on 450 W.

The generational leap from Ampere to Lovelace and the potential “double performance” actually indicates that the RTX 40 series could be expectedly efficient even at the higher power costs. An older leak from the end of 2020 claimed that the Lovelace AD102 GPU would be capable of 66.4 TFLOPs in FP32 at 1.8 GHz and the RTX 3090 has been reported offering 35.6 TFLOPs FP32 compute. So almost double the performance here with possibly double the power requirement: 300 W vs. 600 W (RTX 3090 vs. RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti).

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