What happens when you put seven NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs inside a PC and run it through content creation benchmarks? Well, Pugetsystems has the answer for that.
7 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs Offer Perfect Scaling Within OctaBench While Consuming Almost 3000 Watts of Power
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU as it is, is one beast of a graphics card but PugetSystems has gone a mile ahead and put seven of these BFGPUs together in their latest test setup. Their latest test setup is fitted with some insane specifications that include an AMD Threadripper PRO 5995 WX CPU with 64-cores, an ASUS Pro WX WRX80E-SAGE WIFI motherboard, 128 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD and four (yep, you heard it right, 4 Super Flower LEADEX 1.6 Kilowatt PSUs for a total of 6400 Watt of power. This was compulsory since the system is running seven NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards that require a total of 28 8-pin connectors to feed the seven 16-pin plugs.
Now while the NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4090 graphics cards are rated at 450W which should end up around 3.15 KW of power, the rest of the system also requires power. The graphics cards include four Founders Edition and three custom designs from PNY and ASUS (XLR8 / TUF Gaming). We've seen NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs consume up to 600W of power, especially with the higher power limit on FE variants. PugetSystems was also nice enough to share the total cost of the rig & the entire system would cost around $30,000 US.
To make the system run smoothly, several riser cables were used and run in PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 mode since Gen 4 x16 mode was causing trouble. With everything booted, the seven GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs can be seen consuming up to 2750 Watts of power. What's interesting is the idle power draw. Those 7 GPUs almost consume as much power as one RTX 4090 consumes while standard gaming workloads are around 300-400W.
7 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Content Creation GPU Benchmarks (Image Credits: PugetSystems):
In terms of performance, the OctaneBench (RTX Enabled) shows perfect scaling across all seven NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs so if you are invested in this particular workload, then going the multi-GPU route with GeForce hardware is one hell of an option. V-Ray also shows a >6x boost in performance using the RTX mode and a >5x boost in CUDA mode. RedShift shows a 4.6x boost in performance while DaVinci Resolve shows performance regression beyond 5 GPUs. The max the workload can offer is a 3x performance boost.
Someone even managed to get 8 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs running together and benched them in OctaneBench which showcases a linear scaling of 8x. This is a great showcase of GeForce RTX 4090's content creation and rendering capabilities. Unfortunately, this is not a practical build and it's better to invest in a Professional RTX GPU with NVLINK for proper multi-GPU capabilities. Plus, there's no game out there that can support 7, let alone even 2 RTX 4090 GPUs, and offer good scaling.
