Gaming PC

Some RTX 4090 Graphics Cards Recommend a 1200W Power Supply

It’s no secret that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 requires serious power hardware. This follows in his RTX 3090 Ti’s footsteps and is expected to be the fastest among the best graphics cards while also placing high on the GPU benchmark hierarchy soon. Still, Nvidia’s AIB (add-in board) partners recommend different PSUs for different RTX 4090 models.

Some AIBs follow Nvidia’s standard PSU recommendation of just 850W, but quite a few list 1000W as their recommended PSU capacity, with some going as high as a staggering 1200W. We looked at all the partner cards and mostly stuck to each AIB partner’s flagship card to see just how far the company is ready to push the RTX 4090 and Nvidia Ada Lovelace.

GeForce RTX 4090 PSU Wattage Requirements
model Target board power Minimum PSU Wattage
Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC do not know 1000W
Aorus RTX 4090 Master do not know 1000W
MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X, Suprim Liquid X do not know 850W
PNY RTX 4090 Belt Epic-X 450W 850W
Zotac RTX 4090 AMP Extreme, Trinity 450W 1000W
Galax RTX 4090 SG, ST do not know 850W
All colorful RTX 4090 models do not know do not know
Inno3D RTX 4090 X3 OC iChill Black do not know 850W
Palit RTX 4090 Game Rock OC 450W 1200W
Gainward RTX 4090 Phantom GS do not know do not know

Starting with Asus, on ROG Strix models, the company recommends a 1000W PSU. Note that Asus assumes you will overclock both the CPU and GPU. Of course, it increases potential power usage. The recommended value is 150W higher than Nvidia’s Reference Founders Edition. The same 1000W PSU recommendation can be found on Gigabyte’s Aorus Master and Zotac’s AMP Extreme/Trinity RTX 4090 graphics cards.

For MSI, PNY, Galax and Inno3D’s flagship 4090 GPU, these models all drop to Nvidia’s reference PSU recommendation of 850W. That’s probably more reasonable, but you have to be careful not to try to go with the cheaper 850W model — 80 Plus Gold or better is the bare minimum for this level of GPU.

But the star of the show, or perhaps a supernova in this case, is Palit, whose RTX 4090 GameRock graphics card recommends a whopping 1200W PSU. The Quad SLI GTX 980 Ti could use more power back then, which is the most demanding spec we’ve seen from any graphics card company to date. However, it is clear that there are four GPUs instead of one.

Palit neglected to share the reasoning behind the giant 1200W PSU recommendation, but there could be several reasons for that. If you overclock your setup heavily, 1200W can feel like a guarantee. Or maybe it’s based on what we see from extreme cards like the Galax Hall of Fame (HOF). Except for Palit, the cards also list a TBP (Total Board Power) of just 450W.

Gainward and Colorful have neglected to share their power supply recommendations and graphics card power requirements for now. Please note that Palit is the parent company of Gainward (and Galax, KFA2, etc.).

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

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