Alleged Nvidia RTX 4090 factory photos appear showing Zotac model

We heard recent reports that the Nvidia RTX 4090 officially entered production, and it didn’t take long for the pictures to begin showing up. It appears a factory worker or someone with direct access to the facility was able to snap some images of a Zotac Airo model, and those things look chonky.

Unsurprisingly, the original post on Baidu was quickly deleted, but the internet quickly claimed it as its own. The design itself looks similar in size to the RTX 3090 Ti, which makes sense given the rumored TDP of 450W. That would put the RTX 4090 perfectly in line with the power consumption of the RTX 3090 Ti. It also further reinforces the assumptions that the RTX 3090 Ti was somewhat of a production trial run to work out things like cooling issues. Going by Zotac’s specs for those models, that could put the RTX 4090 around 3.5 slots thick (160mm) and 356mm in length. Frankly, the RTX 4090 looks a tad thicker.

There’s not much else to glean from the leaked photo of the RTX 4090, but you can see the following RTX 3090 Ti images for reference. What does stand out about the design for the RTX 4090 model is the curved edge. There certainly are any cards currently on the market that look like this, so it appears to lend further credence to these indeed being of a new design.

Pictured is the Zotac RTX 3090 Ti for reference. (Image credit: Zotac).

Additionally, there are leaked photos of the boxes these cards will go in. The designs are strikingly high quality, even if the image is not. It’s pretty convincing these are legit. We can see these cards will feature things like dual BIOS, RGB, a zero-RPM fan mode, and more. The minor text is far more difficult to make out, but we are able to make out that the RTX 4090 will only require PCIe 4.0 x16. Hence, all that hubbub about PCIe 5.0 is really overblown.

(Image credit: Baidu).

Nvidia RTX 4090 rumored performance

Gaming performance estimates are still largely unknown, but that should change very quickly once production models permeate supply chains and more individuals can’t help themselves from spilling the beans. In the meantime, we can go off of what rumors have been around for a while now.

Nvidia reportedly tapped TSMC’s N4P node to improve the density of the chip, lending to better raw performance and power efficiency. That more compact node helps Nvidia fit more CUDA cores, stream multiprocessors, and significantly more L2 cache into the chip. Additionally, it’s expected that Nvidia will pair it with a 24 GB capacity of 23Gbps GDDR6X memory. The specs are further detailed here.

The performance is estimated to reach a 70-90% improvement over the RTX 3090. That’s also thanks to the 450W TDP, and it should be even higher for the rumored 600W RTX 4090 Ti. One source claims to have received a benchmark for the game Control, where the 4090 Ti made easy work of it even at a 4K resolution, high refresh rate, and with max settings. That bodes seriously well for its RTX 4090 “smaller sibling.”

Nvidia’s expected to reveal the RTX 4090 at GTC on September 20 during a special livestream. Speaking of card designs, it’s rumored the RTX 40 Series FE models will also reuse a good bit of the RTX 30 Series Founder’s Edition design.