TECH NEWS – It seems that Nvidia’s ploy wasn’t enough to scare Chinese users away from the company’s high-end card, as the “D-rated” edition is still able to match the performance of the “factory” RTX 4090…

The RTX 4090D was created as a way for Nvidia to comply with US export regulations, so the goat gets fed and the cabbage stays. At launch, we heard that no manufacturer was allowed to factory OC (higher clock speeds), so neither power consumption nor clock speeds could deviate from the baseline set by Nvidia. Nevertheless, the RTX 4090D delivered 95% of the performance of the RTX 4090 FE (Founders Edition) by default…

However, there are some models (such as the Asus GeForce RTX 4090D ROG Strix) that can be boosted. In tests conducted by HKEPC, the graphics card’s power consumption (TGP) was increased from the default value (425W) to 600W in Asus GPU Tweak III, a jump of 41%. The clock speed was increased by 200 MHz and the memory by 187 MHz, resulting in a 9.3% improvement in the 3DMark Speedway benchmark. This beats the RTX 4090 FE!

During the tests, the power consumption was 558.4 W (+31.4%), while the clock speed was 3045 MHz maximum. The performance was also improved by up to 8.7% in the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark. It’s not yet known if it’s possible to tune or increase the power consumption on the other RTX 4090D models, but it’s the case that with a sufficiently beefy power supply and a stable motherboard, the Chinese public can easily squeeze out the factory RTX 4090’s performance.

There’s just one catch: the Asus ROG Strix model costs 17000 RMB in China, which is about $250 more than the US MSRP ($2350). So they’ve released a card that can easily be brought up to the international level with a little trickery, and Nvidia makes a lot of money in the process!

Source: WCCFTech, HKEPC