Reddit forum user shared an interesting story of the acquisition of the GeForce RTX 4090 video card, equipped with an air cooling system with a tangential-type fan, popularly known as a “turbine”. According to the testament of NVIDIA, the GeForce RTX 4090 model in this version should not exist, however, a user with the nickname BottleneckEvader took advantage of a random opportunity and acquired such a unique copy.
Image Source: Reddit / BottleneckEvader
On the market, it is almost impossible to find a GeForce RTX 4090 with an air cooling system no more than two expansion slots thick. Most non-reference variants of this accelerator from various manufacturers are 3.5-4 slots thick. At the same time, even the reference version of the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition from NVIDIA itself has a thickness of three expansion slots. If you need an even more compact option, then you will have to look at the GeForce RTX 4090 versions with a water block.
For this reason, the GeForce RTX 4090 with a “turbine” aroused great interest from Reddit users when one of the forum members showed the accelerator he had purchased. He paid regarding $2675 for the card. This is almost the same price as local stores offer the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X model with a much larger, more efficient and less noisy air cooling system.
According to BottleneckEvader, he visited a local Japanese computer hardware store, where the seller offered him a GeForce RTX 4090, which was released in a very limited edition and equipped with an unusual cooling system for a video card of this level. In this version, BottleneckEvader decided to buy a video card for two reasons: his area of interest is related to machine learning technologies; any other versions of the GeForce RTX 4090 (except for variants with LSS) would not fit in its compact Fractal Torrent Nano case.
In the box, in addition to the card itself, which is not marked by any brands, there was a power adapter from three 8-pin to one 12+4-pin 12VHPWR connector. On the casing of the accelerator cooling system, there is an inscription in Morse code, meaning “AI Edition”.
As it turned out, the maximum power consumption of a video card with a “turbine” is 450 watts. It cannot be increased, since the card in this version was not originally designed for additional overclocking.
The fan of the video card cooling system operates at speeds up to 5200 rpm, so you have to use headphones when the load is high. At the same time, the graphics chip of the accelerator under load warms up to an average of 78 degrees Celsius, and the temperature of the GDDR6X memory chips rises to regarding 98 degrees.
In the 3DMark Time Spy synthetic test, the video card scored 35,908 points at standard settings. By slightly increasing the frequency of the GPU (while not changing the TDP), the user achieved 36,956 points from it in the same test. In other words, the unusual video card works with the same return as all other versions of the GeForce RTX 4090 – their average score is regarding 35,978 points in the same benchmark.
A curious detail of the unusual GeForce RTX 4090 is also the location of the connector for additional power – it is located at the back of the accelerator. The 12VHPWR planned to use the same place for the location of the 12 + 4-pin power connector on its GeForce RTX 4090 FTW3 EVGA company. However, as you know, the latter decided to leave the video card market.
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