NVIDIA's Next-Gen RTX 4080 And 4090 Will Consume INSANE Amounts Of Power: Rumor

If you want to buy an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 once they come out, you need to make sure that your power supply will be up to snuff.

That's because NVIDIA's upcoming top-end RTX 4000 cards will be absolute monsters in terms of power consumption, according to this latest rumor. PCGamer reports that the 4080 and 4090 will consume so much power mainly due to how many VRMs they pack on a single PCB.

The rumor comes from German tech site Igor's Lab, who says that high-end NVIDIA RTX 4000 cards will have at least 24 VRM phases for a Founder's Edition model. For the uninitiated, this is a sky-high amount of VRMs which only points to one thing: insanely high power consumption.

But as to how much power the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 will pull from the wall, however, it's still unclear.

Nevertheless, that many VRMs on a Founder's Edition NVIDIA RTX 4080/4090 is insane. That's not even considering the fact that AIB models from companies like Gigabyte, ASUS, or MSI would perhaps feature even more due to their factory-overclocked designs. As such, this latest leak falls right within rumors of TDPs as high as 600W or more, which were floating around the tech space earlier this year.

More Power, More (Heat) Problems

Here's another certain thing about the upcoming Ada Lovelace cards from NVIDIA. With sky-high power consumption comes a lot of heat. And with that much heat, you can expect the graphics cards' coolers to be oh-so-chunky-perhaps even chunkier than the biggest RTX 3000 cards currently in existence.

Among the biggest RTX 3090s, for example, will consume around 3 PCIe slots on your PC (via Tom's Hardware). It is even rumored that a custom RTX 3090 Ti from AIB partner Colorful, which is due to launch soon, could have a cooler that's 4 PCIe slots thick.

The 3090 Ti is already a beefy card in its own right. But compared to how the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 has been described in early rumors, it might be dwarfed. That's because of a simple premise: the larger the cooler is, the better it will be at dissipating so much heat generated by the sky-high power consumption.

What Kind Of PSU Will You Need For The New NVIDIA Cards?

Long story short: a very expensive one. According to renowned industry leaker Greymon55 on Twitter, you could assume that a single RTX 4080 or 4090 would need at least an 850W power supply, but even that might not be enough. "There may be some deviation" says Greymon, which could mean the PSU requirement will be far higher than initially assumed:

Going back to the 3090 Ti for perspective, that thing eats up a 1000W PSU for breakfast, writes PCGamesN. Imagine a card that's one generation newer with far more graphical muscle than a 3090 Ti could ever muster, and you'll see the bigger picture.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce