I used AI to help Nvidia design an 800W version of the RTX 4090

I’m not above a little derivative foolishness of a bleak monday morning. And so I asked the AI painter de jour, DALL-E mini (opens in new tab), to help visualise what an 800W RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) might look like should the green team go all out. I think DALL-E has actually nailed the cooling array, so I’m going to steal it and see if I can get a design credit from Jen-Hsun.

We’re edging ever closer to the launch of the new Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards, yet we don’t really have a lot to go on in terms of what they’re going to look like. Or even really how they’re going to be specced out.

There were rumours a while back of the green team testing AD102 boards with 800W total board power (TBP), and though that is unlikely to actually appear in a release graphics card—at least not for the consumer market—I kinda wanted to see what one might look like. The DALL-E design features a dual-fan cooling array on top, with a supplementary 120mm fan pushing air down the length of the PCB, presumably to an exhaust vent pointing towards the back of the PC.

That would result in a very chunky, maybe five-slot graphics card design, but it sure would be able to house a heatsink capable of keeping such a hot and heavy Ada Lovelace GPU cooled. But yeah, ‘heavy’ might very well be the watchword here if ‘efficiency’ certainly isn’t; you’re going to want a support bracket in there, I’d wager.

Thankfully, the latest rumours suggest the top-end card of the next Nvidia generation, the RTX 4090 will be a 450W board. That is still pretty ludicrous, considering the GeForce RTX 3090 was a 350W card. 

Yeah, I know the RTX 3090 Ti is a 450W card, too, but that is also a ludicrous board.

Anyways, once we’d established what an super over-specced card would look like I then questioned what would be going on under the hood when such a GPU might require its own discrete power supply. 

This is one hell of blurry cable hell prediction right here…

In order to be even-handed with regards the artificial intelligences involved I also let Nvidia’s own GauGan2 AI Art tool have a go at creating us a over-powered 800W RTX 4090 design. To be fair, it doesn’t have an ‘object’ setting, and is better suited to creating landscape images.

Still, this feels like a tortured digital soul desperate to be loved. Or at least taken for a wee day trip to the beach.