THE MIGHTY Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 ($1,599) has finally landed, and it’s a monster. The card has quickly dominated the benchmark tables, proving virtually unbeatable, especially at higher resolutions. Nvidia claims the card is over twice as fast as the RTX 3090 Ti.
It’s not just a gaming beast either, it has also proved to be the world’s best password-cracking card, thanks to all that raw GPU power. Using a benchmark called Hashcat, a researcher found the card to be over twice as fast as the previous champion, the RTX 3090. As impressive as it is, AMD’s RDNA 3 cards are just around the corner, and we’ll get an RTX 4090 Ti at some point too. However, for now, the RTX 4090 rules the roost.
As welcome as the 4000-series cards are, not everything has gone smoothly for Nvidia. We were expecting trouble with the amount of power the RTX 4090 can chew through. It’s officially ranked as having a TDP of 450W, however, it can be pushed to more than that, especially if you overclock it. To supply that power, the card uses a 12VHPWR socket. This 16-pin socket can, in theory, deliver 600W. It’s part of the ATX 3.0 PSU specifications and was added to cope with the expected new generation of power-hungry cards. It has 12 power pins, and four smaller pins for sideband signals. These enable the graphic card to detect what
