NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace flagship, the RTX 4090, has a TBP (total board power) of 450W, the same as the 3090. However, the graphics card may draw significantly more power in specific workloads. A couple of benchmarks of the GPU have been shared over at Bilibili, showing the operating frequencies and power consumption of the card in two intensive tests:
As you can see, the RTX 4090 draws a total power of 425W in MSI Kombuster, a stress-testing application, while sustaining a GPU core clock of 3GHz. This is nearly 500MHz higher than its stock boost clock of 2,520MHz.
The other test, which looks like Furmark, is a different story. The RTX 4090 draws a ridiculous 615W power (GPU: 498W + Board: ~117W) while running at 2.64GHz. This is crazy, especially considering that the 4090 has a TBP of 450W. This means that the power limits of the Ada Lovelace flagship aren’t hardwired and will be alterable using the BIOS. Enthusiasts have been leveraging this for years to push their cards to their limits.
With that said, it’s worth noting that modern GPUs tend to cross their specifications when running Furmark and other related benchmarks, which isn’t something we should see in games. Still, a bump of 165W over the stock power limit is pretty wild to see.
