Nvidia’s best graphics cards are notorious for being power-hungry beasts, but some freshly leaked prototypes show that the company had much bigger plans. Various engineering samples surfaced on the Chiphell forums, including a prototype of the RTX 4090 with not one, not two, but four 16-pin power connectors. Will such designs ever see the light of day?
The leaker shared pictures of board prototypes going all the way back to the GTX 10 series, with the latest GPU being the RTX 4090. However, the leaker claims that the RTX 5090 was also prototyped with up to four power connectors, although such a card wasn’t among the pictured boards.
Still, let’s be real: Four 16-pin power connectors is a pretty insane number. Looking at the AD102 prototype, which corresponds to the RTX 4090 model, we’re seeing those four 16-pin connectors alongside a 45-phase power delivery. One 12VHPWR connector means a maximum 600-watt power consumption, so using four of those would’ve brought that figure up to 2,400 watts. That’s more than even the most high-end gaming PC consumes right now, and more than any power supply could possibly handle.
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A prototype like this implies that Nvidia may have tried to dream (much) bigger, which links up with various whispers of a possible Titan GPU. Such a card, which many leakers claim was actually made for the Ada Lovelace lineup and then never used, would’ve ramped up both the overall specs and the power consumption.
Would the RTX 4090 (or 5090) Titan use four 12VHPWR connectors, though? No way. The most we’ve ever seen in a consumer GPU were overclocked variants of Nvidia’s flagships, made by the company’s board partners, which sported two. It’s hard to imagine any GPU requiring that much power, nor would it be viable. We’ve heard of many cases of the 12VHPWR burning up — even in the RTX 5090 — so adding three more is hardly practical.
Older GPU models were featured too, with slightly less extreme power configurations. The Ampere generation was well represented: There was the GA102 Ampere board with four 8-pin connectors, but also the GA104 with three. Ampere cards ended up using 12-pin connectors outside of the prototype stage, but clearly, Nvidia was toying around with different designs too.
Keep in mind that we can’t take these prototypes at face value. They look legitimate, but they didn’t come directly from Nvidia. Still, assuming these are all real, it’s interesting to see that Nvidia may have tried to create a 2,400-watt GPU. Good thing those plans never came to fruition.