gee-pee-oooh-my-my-that's-big —

We are currently testing the Nvidia RTX 4090—let us show you its heft

We can't say much yet, but its size may clarify who this $1,599-and-up GPU isn't for.

Sam Machkovech - 10/5/2022, 11:26 PM

It's a busy time in the Ars Technica GPU testing salt mines (not to be confused with the mining that GPUs used to be known for). After wrapping up our take on the Intel Arc A700 series, we went right back to testing a GPU that we've had for a few days now: the Nvidia RTX 4090.

This beast of a GPU, provided by Nvidia to Ars Technica for review purposes, is priced well out of the average consumer range, even for a product category where the average price keeps creeping upward. Though we're not allowed to disclose anything about our testing as of press time, our upcoming coverage will reflect this GPU's $1,599-and-up reality. In the meantime, we thought an unboxing of Nvidia's "founders edition" of the 4090 would begin telling the story of exactly who this GPU might not be for.

On paper, the Nvidia RTX 4090 is poised to blow past its Nvidia predecessors, with specs that handily surpass early 2022's overkill RTX 3090 Ti product. The 4090 comes packed with approximately 50 percent more CUDA cores and between 25 and 33 percent higher counts in other significant categories, particularly cores dedicated to tensor and ray-tracing calculations (which are also updated to new specs for Nvidia's new 5 nm process). However, one spec from the 3090 and 3090 Ti remains identical: its VRAM type and capacity (once again, 24GB of GDDR6X RAM).

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Yet despite surpassing the 3090 Ti in many performance-impacting specs, Nvidia is sticking to a power maximum of 450 W—still a power-hungry card, certainly, but the results may push a new level of efficiency for such a high-end product. Clearly, something has to give if the power maximum isn't changing, and that comes in the form of a massive new chassis, now requiring three full PCI-e slots of space in your preferred gaming case, along with additional length.

You can estimate that additional size in your own case by comparing its 12-inch (304 mm) length and 5.4-inch (137 mm) depth with a more standard-sized GPU like the new Intel Arc A770 (pictured in the above final gallery). You'll also need to make room for at least three standard 8-pin power connector cables in your case of choice, which can be plugged into an ATX 3.0 12-pin adapter (pictured in the second-to-last gallery). Our size-comparison gallery goes everywhere, from a plastic Yoshi toy to a banana and from an Xbox controller to an entire Xbox console.

If there's anything you're itching to know about the RTX 4090, whether because you want to buy it specifically or because you wonder how its launch will affect other future GPU technologies, let us know in the comments section. This unboxing can't go into performance questions like a new DLSS system or cheaper models in the Ada Lovelace GPU line, but our upcoming review, slated to run next week ahead of the GPU's October 12 launch date, will go much further.

This article has been updated since publication to correct an error about the 4090's included power cable.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech