Nvidia RTX 4090 Graphics Card Review

Power Consumption

So, the big one. Power usage. There’s been a lot of talk about Ada Lovelace, power spiking to stupidly high levels and needing higher wattage power supplies to run them. Before we get into the power, it’s worth noting that the NVIDIA reference power spec is 450 watts, and the Gigabyte Gaming OC card conforms to that, while the MSI is rated, in gaming mode and not silent mode to go above that to 480 watts, but during our testing, we actually found an issue affecting multiple SKUs of cards including MSI and ASUS cards that were showing restrictive power limits of 450 watts. Sadly, after creating this content, MSI took the card from us to rotate it around to another media, but we will definitely look to see about retesting the card when it comes back to see if any performance metrics change, but in our opinion, the difference would be deemed in the same realm as margin of error, which is around 1 to 2% so nothing really to worry about, but it’s worth noting the card was potentially not working to its rated spec and something I’m sure will be fixed by MSI and NVIDIA in conjunction with each other.

Power Consumption

Now, in the course of our benchmarking, we saw pretty decent figures at idle, with the Gigabyte card sipping another 28% more power when compared to the RTX 3090 Ti but actually around 4% less than our RTX 3090 Suprim X. The RTX 4090 Suprim X however, was a slightly different story as it consumed 98% more power at idle than the RTX 3090 Ti did.

At load across 15 games, thanks to the new TSMC 4nm process, we see some pretty decent figures with the RTX 4090 Suprim X coming in with 18% less power draw when compared to the RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X. The Gigabyte card uses a little more at around 3% more power compared to the MSI 4090, which then gives us a slightly smaller decrease of 14% compared to the Ampere flagship. Right now, in terms of these figures, I’d be a little cautious with the MSI figure, due to the reasons I mentioned, and you could see this power draw increase ever so slightly.

So power actually looks a bit better than what everyone was expecting, and for a very good reason. From our own industry insider sources, it seems that Ada Lovelace was always planned, at least from a power sense, to continue on Samsung’s 8nm node, and this was all finalised at the start of 2022 because these things like that generally take time when developing a product. Shortly after, as things drew closer to the summer, from what we’re hearing, that’s where TSMC stepped in and started producing for NVIDIA on the 4nm fabrication process and that’s why the power draw is actually a lot lower than what we were anticipating. That’s also why we were able to test through the NVIDIA PCAT which only has 3 8-pin power connectors on, even though our adapter cable uses 4 8-pin connectors because, as we confirmed in a video we did with JonnyGURU, each connector is capable of 342 Watts which is more than enough with a large overhead.