According to a Redditor named “cavityserach123,” NVIDIA is now shipping a new variant of the RTX 4090 under its Founder Edition series. This comes after reports from two months ago that NVIDIA would be introducing new variants of their RTX 40 GPU, including the RTX 4070 and RTX 4080 with updated GPUs.
As previously mentioned, changes were made to the RTX 40 GPU to enable a new voltage comparator circuit on the board. This eliminated the need to use the GPU’s comparator for this function. While some reports suggested that this change could lead to slightly cheaper boards and lower build costs for AIBs and NVIDIA, the pricing for RTX 40 GPUs hasn’t really changed much at this time. So, it seems those reports were not accurate.
A Redditor by the name of “cavitysearch123” recently received the newest RTX 4090 Founder Edition after waiting for three months. Interestingly, the card that he received featured the AD102-301 GPU, and there were no previous reports indicating that the RTX 4090 would also receive this upgrade.
After taking a closer look, the owner of the RTX 4090 FE noticed that the GPU-Z showed a new model ID for the card. The Device PCI ID remained the same, but the Sub ID had been updated. This indicates that flashing the BIOS with an AD102-300 based model should not be possible, and the user has confirmed this to be the case.
There are claims that the maximum power limit for this variant of the RTX 4090 is lower than the original SKU, with the maximum voltage reportedly limited to 1.07V instead of 1.1V. However, more samples are needed to verify this information. It’s also unclear whether only the NVIDIA Founders Edition is affected by this limit or whether we should expect a similar voltage limit to be implemented on custom RTX 4090s as well.
The maximum voltage of 1.07V was confirmed using MSI Afterburner and ASUS GPU Tweak voltage/frequency curve editors. Despite the changes, the maximum voltage remains the same. It’s worth noting that it’s not possible to flash the BIOS to the “original” RTX 4090 BIOS due to a PCI ID mismatch. We hope that this change won’t have any significant impact on performance.
Via Reddit