In July, 2024, Teclab showcased how they transformed a GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 Ti HOF graphics card into the world’s only NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 SUPER. This new graphics card features NVIDIA’s AD102 “Ada” GPU and is equipped with the fastest GDDR6X memory, making its performance exceptionally impressive.
Currently, NVIDIA has not released an official “SUPER” version of the RTX 4090, and given the impending launch of the next-generation RTX 50 series, the likelihood of releasing such a card is low. However, Teclab’s custom card demonstrates a potential enhanced version of the RTX 4090, featuring specially selected Ada chips and an optimized cooling system.
Next, let’s take a look at how the Teclab team meticulously crafted this powerful custom graphics card.
01
Project Concept and Hardware Selection
The Teclab team conceived this project around the launch of the RTX 3090 Ti. Although the RTX 3090 Ti is a late-stage product of the RTX 30 series, it shares many design similarities with the RTX 40 series graphics cards. The PCB design of the 3090 Ti, while similar to the RTX 3090 (GA102), also shares key details with the RTX 4090 (AD102), such as memory interface and voltage control.
To achieve this transformation, Teclab selected the RTX 3090 Ti HOF OC LAB version as the base. This version of the graphics card is equipped with an efficient water cooling system, allowing them to achieve excellent cooling performance without using extreme cooling techniques like LN2. Since the RTX 4090 HOF version lacks an OC LAB version, Teclab used the water cooling module from the RTX 3090 Ti HOF as a foundation and modified it.
02
Key Modifications and Technical Challenges
In terms of hardware modifications, Teclab made several major upgrades to the graphics card, including replacing the GPU with the AD102, installing 24 Gbps GDDR6X memory modules, adjusting the memory interface, and redesigning the voltage controller to accommodate the GPU’s needs. To ensure the stability of the memory modules, the Teclab team hand-picked each GDDR6X chip, using top-tier 24 Gbps GDDR6X memory from Micron.
While it may seem like a simple hardware replacement, the entire process was far more complex than anticipated. Leveraging their extensive expertise and experience, the Teclab team successfully overcame numerous technical challenges, such as power distribution, memory interface adaptation, and voltage fine-tuning. With the close collaboration of GALAX, Teclab had the necessary tools and schematics to modify the PCB, ensuring all modification steps proceeded smoothly.
03
Cooling System and Performance Testing
For cooling, the Teclab team retained the original water cooling system but optimized it. They used high-quality thermal paste on each memory chip and applied custom thermal materials to the GPU to ensure good contact between the water block and the nickel-plated base plate.
This water cooling system consists of two 360mm radiators and a pump with a flow rate of 234 L per hour. At an ambient temperature of 18.7°C, the coolant temperature was maintained around 20°C. Even with the graphics card running at a high frequency of over 3 GHz, the temperature remained at just 54-55°C, showing excellent performance.
04
Conclusion
In performance tests, this custom RTX 4090 SUPER graphics card achieved exceptionally high scores in the Unigine Superposition 8K benchmark. The card ran at an overclocked frequency of 3105 MHz with a memory frequency of 12,900 MHz, delivering a 39% overall performance improvement compared to the stock NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, with even a 16.5% increase without LOD adjustments.
After hundreds of hours of modification, tuning, and testing, the Teclab team successfully pushed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 SUPER graphics card to outperform several RTX 4090 cards cooled with LN2. In the future, Teclab plans to conduct more tests on this card, including extreme overclocking with LN2, and we eagerly await the results.
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