NVIDIA has quietly started shipping a new AD102 GPU for its flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card.
NVIDIA’s AD102-301 GPU now ships with GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards
A few months ago, NVIDIA started shipping out revised GPU dies for its GeForce RTX 40 GPUs that were rolling out to the retail segment. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti were the first to get the new chips and allowed the AIBs to bypass the GPU voltage comparator onto the board itself. This wasn’t a huge change, but it was necessary for more streamlined and efficient operation of Ada GPUs.
Redditor, cavitysearch123, has now discovered that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards also ship with a new die known as the AD102-301 GPU.
Not only was the GPU changed, but the board number was also revised to “16F4”, while the original Founders Edition cards were based on the “165B” board. Based on the look of the GPU, it is essentially the same design and the only visual change that can be made is the label with the new GPU SKU ID.
The user did not stop there and proceeded to run some tests on the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card. It seems that the maximum voltage for the new GPU is limited to a maximum of 1.070 V, whereas the original Founders Edition offered a maximum set voltage of 1.1 V. Also, the older FE BIOS cannot be updated on the newer one. card or vice versa due to the difference in IDs.
To confirm that the voltage was indeed lower, MSI’s Afterburner was used and you can see that the card maxes out at 1,070V. Even manually adjusting the core voltage and adjusting the frequency and voltage curve didn’t change anything for the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. The same thing happened when using the ASUS GPU Tweak utility. Now, Ada Lovelace GPUs are very efficient in the way they handle power, so a small change in the new GPU’s voltages shouldn’t affect performance much, but it’s something worth looking into.
News source: VideoCardz
