Acer’s Liquid Cooled RTX 4090 – Tested!

1. Introduction2. Meet Acer's Liquid Cooled RTX 40903. Testing Methodology4. Game Benchmarks5. Clock Speed6. GPU Temperatures7. Memory Temperatures8. Acoustics9. Noise-Normalised Temperatures10. Power Draw11. Overclocking12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

Update 15 December 2023: Since publishing this article, it has come to our attention that the Predator Orion X prebuilt system, from which we took this RTX 4090, was a late-stage engineering sample and not a finished retail product. This was unknown to us before producing this analysis and naturally the results shown must be viewed with that in mind. We will aim to get a final retail sample as soon as possible to revisit the performance. Read more on this HERE.

When I first got hands-on with Acer’s Predator Orion X prebuilt system and found out that not only does it use a custom-made RTX 4090, but one that is actually liquid cooled with a built-in pump and radiator… well, you just know I had to take a closer look! In today’s analysis, we take this card out of the Orion X and put it into our regular GPU test system to see how it stacks up against a range of RTX 4090 cards from more established brands, and it did not go how I expected…

	RTX 4090	RTX 4080	RTX 3090 Ti	RTX 3090	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3080
Process	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N	Samsung 8N
SMs	128	76	84	82	80	68
CUDA Cores	16384	9728	10752	10496	10240	8704
Tensor Cores	512	304	336	328	320	272
RT Cores	128	76	84	82	80	68
Texture Units	512	304	336	328	320	272
ROPs	176	112	112	112	112	96
GPU Boost Clock	2520 MHz	2505 MHz	1860 MHz	1695 MHz	1665 MHz	1710 MHz
Memory Data Rate	21 Gbps	22.4 Gbps	21 Gbps	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	19 Gbps
L2 Cache	73729 KB	65536 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	6144 KB	5120 KB
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	16GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1008 GB/Sec	716.8 GB/Sec	1008 GB/Sec	936 GB/Sec	912 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec
TGP	450W	320W	450W	350W	350W	320W

First, for a quick spec recap. Using TSMC's 4N node has allowed Nvidia to vastly increase transistor count, up from 28.3 billion with GA102, to a staggering 76.3 billion with the largest Ada GPU, AD102. Accordingly, core count has gone through the roof, with the RTX 4090 home to 16384 CUDA cores, with 512 Tensor cores and 128 RT cores, with a sizeable increase to the ROP count too, up to 176.

Such a leap forward in process node has also allowed Nvidia to crank the clock speed significantly, with the RTX 4090 now sporting a 2520MHz rated boost clock. Acer has left their model at stock clocks.

Memory configuration is almost identical to the RTX 3090 Ti, with 24GB GDDR6X running at 21Gbps, operating over a 384-bit interface, totalling memory bandwidth of just over 1TB/s. That said, there has been a substantial upgrade to the L2 cache with the Ada architecture, with the RTX 4090 now offering 73MB, compared to 6MB for GA102.

Power draw also remains at 450W, as per the RTX 3090 Ti, with Acer's custom card also coming in at that stock power figure.

Become a Patron!