With Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series reportedly doubling the performance of its predecessor, it shouldn’t be too surprising that either the RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti may require a massive 1,200-watt power supply unit (PSU).
Twitter user harukaze5719 made a general tweet regarding Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake CPUs, as well as Nvidia’s Lovelace GPUs. He mentioned that specs could be “literally exploded.”
Expecting i9 13900K + RTX 4090 Ti recommand PSU at least 1000W GOLD
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) January 16, 2022
A follow-up tweet added some further context; “Expecting i9 13900K + RTX 4090 Ti recommand PSU at least 1000W GOLD.” However, another well-known leaker responded to the aforementioned tweet by claiming 1,000 watts will not be enough to power the upcoming Nvidia graphics card.
1000W is not enough. I don't know whether it is 4090 or 4090TI, but there is a model that can reach 600W.
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) January 16, 2022
As pointed out by NotebookCheck, Greymon55 has regularly provided updates pertaining to the RTX 40 series. One such update was revealing that Lovelace video cards would deliver “double performance” of the GeForce RTX 3090. 18,432 CUDA cores will inevitably need a considerable amount of power. Greymon55 believes a 600W power supply will thus be required for either the GeForce RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti. That said, according to the leaker, the 600W PSU is attached to a reference board as opposed to a custom model.
Therefore, should Greymon55’s sources turn out to be correct, anyone interested in the GeForce RTX 4090 or RTX 4090 Ti will be required to integrate a 1,200W PSU when building their system. As NotebookCheck highlights, a high level of power is essential in order to handle the GPU’s performance and sufficiently provide enough juice for other components.
Lending credence to the claim of a 1,200W PSU is a leak indicating that the GeForce RTX 4090’s predecessor, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, features a TDP of 480W, which would need at least a 1,000W PSU in order to power the card.
As for other technical specifications for the RTX 4090, the video card will reportedly offer a clock speed between 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz. The Lovelace AD102 GPU it is based on would be able to deliver 66.4 TFLOPs in FP32 at 1.8 GHz. Comparatively, the RTX 3090 is said to deliver 35.6 TFLOPs in FP32.
Elsewhere, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is set to become the most expensive graphics card to ever hit the market. With 10,752 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X memory, and 21Gbps of bandwidth, a recent leak shows the GPU could come with a $4,500 price tag.