With just a week left in the launch, we want to give you a first look at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics cards.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition Graphics Cards Unboxing Plus First Impressions
NVIDIA sent several press outlets including us their Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 4090 GPU (or BFGPU as they like to call it). The Founders Edition graphics cards will exist alongside the huge lineup of custom models which we also have prepped and ready for our review. But today, we can only provide you with our unboxing and first look at these cards.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is an absolute mammoth of a design. It is heavier and also features several optimizations to the heatsink that allow the Ada Lovelace GPUs sitting in it to run cool and quiet.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada Lovelace" Founders Edition Graphics Card Unboxing
So let's get started by unboxing this behemoth of a graphics card and start by taking a look at the packing first.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition comes within a large box that weighs around 6Kg and has a rectangular shape. The whole box features a matte black color with the NVIDIA logo on the top left corner and the GeForce RTX 4090 logo below it.
If you flip the box vertically, you will see that it resembles an Xbox Series X console and it is also the same height. The side features an outline of the Founders Edition cooler.
The box will come as a standard with all NVIDIA RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 16 GB Founders Edition cards.
The top and bottom of the box are two separate compartments. The top opens up and the end result looks like a rectangle.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card rests at the center of the packaging & you can see the creative take from NVIDIA in designing this package.
Once the box is open, you finally get to lay your eyes on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card which looks as spectacular as ever.
The card may look like it is the same design as the RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition but it is a slightly updated version which we will explain in a bit.
A cover that exposes a lid sits underneath the card and can be easily pulled to reveal another package.
This package contains a few manuals and also one of the most important accessories that NVIDIA ships with its Founders Edition card.
if you guessed the 16-pin (12VHPWR) connector, then you guessed right. This is an NVIDIA-branded adapter and comes with a single 16-pin to four 8-pin connectors. This is rated to provide up to 600 Watts of power to the chip.
Following is what the 16-pin connector looks like. You may have already seen and heard about it in several articles from us but you can note that there are 12 standard pins and four smaller pins on the connector.
Out of the box, we can finally start taking a much better look at the Ada Lovelace powerhouse/
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada Lovelace" Founders Edition Graphics Card Close Up
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is a true BFGPU. A big chunky card that will take a good amount of room within your PC.
The card comes in a triple-slot design and you can see the several exhaust vents that are there to push air out of the chassis.
On the bottom of the shroud, you can see three plastic panels that cover the main heatsink and the largest one features the "RTX 4090" branding on it.
The back of the card is encircled by the large die-cast aluminum piece, forming an "X" shape in the center.
The card features a dual-axial flow-through design. This design incorporates two fans placed on different sides of the shroud (one front and one back) and perpendicular to one another.
The fan at the bottom pushes air out of the aluminum fins on the backplate.
As you can see, the card is super thick in terms of design and all of this thickness is there to hold the massive aluminum fins and heat pipes that run through the shroud.
You can find a nice "GeForce RTX" logo on the card which features LEDs. A similar LED can also be found within the shroud on the back.
The card comes with a single 16-pin power connector that uses the aforementioned 12VHPWR plug that's bundled with the card.
The new Founders Edition cooler comes with 10% larger fan sizes and 10% larger fin volume. This is all to help the card running super cool and also super quiet.
Once again, you can lay your eyes on the RTX 4090 logo which comes with a new font style. This will be applicable across all RTX 40 series cards.
NVIDIA has taken away some of that aluminum frame room and cut out the corners to make space for the larger fans.
The front side of the card is an aluminum heatsink. These large heatsink block show that there's some serious cooling involved to keep the card running.
There's a nice little "RTX 4090" logo carved out on one of the four aluminum arms on the front of the shroud.
Lastly, we can just tell you that the card feels very premium and very awesome when running on the PC. We can't talk about any temps, noise, power, or performance figures at the moment but be assured that those will be coming in real soon too.
We also want to give you a small taste of the few custom models that we have with us right now. We will have at least four custom models ready for review day but enjoy these two for now:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 'Official' Specifications - $1599 US Pricing
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 will use 128 SMs of the 144 SMs for a total of 16,384 CUDA cores. The GPU will come packed with 96 MB of L2 cache and a total of 512 TMUs and 176 ROPs which is simply insane. The clock speeds are rated at 2230 MHz base and 2520 MHz boost considering that the TSMC 4N process is being used. NVIDIA is claiming over 3 GHz speeds with overclocking which you can read more about here. The card can deliver up to 83 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower at stock.
As for memory specs, the GeForce RTX 4090 features 24 GB GDDR6X capacities that are clocked at 21 Gbps speeds across a 384-bit bus interface. This will provide up to 1 TB/s of bandwidth. This is the same bandwidth as the existing RTX 3090 Ti graphics card and as far as the power consumption is concerned, the TBP is rated at 450W. The card will be powered by a single 16-pin connector which delivers up to 600W of power. Custom models will be offering higher TBP targets.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU officially launches on October 12th, when NVIDIA and custom card partners' designs become available to the public.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Official Specs:
| Graphics Card Name | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 D | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU Name | Ada Lovelace AD102-300 | Ada Lovelace AD102-250 | Ada Lovelace AD103-300 | Ada Lovelace AD104-400 | Ada Lovelace AD104-250 | Ada Lovelace AD106-350 | Ada Lovelace AD107-400 |
| Process Node | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N | TSMC 4N |
| Die Size | 608mm2 | 608mm2 | 378.6mm2 | 294.5mm2 | 294.5mm2 | 190.0mm2 | 146.0mm2 |
| Transistors | 76 Billion | 76 Billion | 45.9 Billion | 35.8 Billion | 35.8 Billion | 22.9 Billion | TBD |
| CUDA Cores | 16384 | 14592 | 9728 | 7680 | 5888 | 4352 | 3072 |
| TMUs / ROPs | 512 / 176 | TBD | 320 / 112 | 240 / 80 | 184 / 64 | 136 / 48 | TBD |
| Tensor / RT Cores | 512 / 128 | 456 / 128 | 304 / 76 | 240 / 60 | 184 / 46 | 136 / 34 | TBD |
| L2 Cache | 72 MB | 72 MB | 64 MB | 48 MB | 36 MB | 32 MB | 24 MB |
| Base Clock | 2230 MHz | 2280 MHz | 2210 MHz | 2310 MHz | 1920 MHz | 2310 MHz | 1830 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 2520 MHz | 2520 MHz | 2510 MHz | 2610 MHz | 2475 MHz | 2535 MHz | 2460 MHz |
| FP32 Compute | 83 TFLOPs | TBD | 49 TFLOPs | 40 TFLOPs | 29 TFLOPs | 22 TFLOPs | 15 TFLOPs |
| RT TFLOPs | 191 TFLOPs | TBD | 113 TFLOPs | 82 TFLOPs | 67 TFLOPs | 51 TFLOPs | 35 TFLOPs |
| Tensor-TOPs | 1321 TOPs | TBD | 780 TOPs | 641 TOPs | 466 TOPs | 353 TOPs | 242 TOPs |
| Memory Capacity | 24 GB GDDR6X | 24 GB GDDR6X | 16 GB GDDR6X | 12 GB GDDR6X | 12 GB GDDR6X | 8-16 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus | 384-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory Speed | 21.0 Gbps | 21.0 Gbps | 23.0 Gbps | 21.0 Gbps | 21.0 Gbps | 18.0 Gbps | 17.0 Gbps |
| Bandwidth | 1008 GB/s | 1008 GB/s | 736 GB/s | 504 GB/s | 504 GB/s | 288 GB/s (554 GB/s Effective) | 272 GB/s (453 GB/s Effective) |
| TBP | 450W | 425W | 320W | 285W | 200W | 160-165W | 115W |
| Price (MSRP / FE) | $1599 US / 1949 EU | 12,999 RMB (China-Only) | $1199 US / 1469 EU | $799 US | $599 US | $399-$499 US | $299 US |
| Price (Current) | $1599 US / 1859 EU | 12,999 RMB (China-Only) | $1199 US / 1399 EU | $799 US | $599 US | $399-$499 US | $299 US |
| Launch (Availability) | 12th October 2022 | 28th December 2023 | 16th November 2022 | 5th January 2023 | 13th April 2023 | 24th May / 18th July 2023 | 29th June 2023 |
