You’ve undoubtedly heard a lot of contradictory information regarding how much power NVIDIA’s new Ada family of GPUs—named for Ada Lovelace—use. There have been drastically disparate claims claiming 400W to “800W or more.” The most of these rumors are really probably true; they’re simply referring to various portions, that’s all.

 

According to the most recent speculations, the first component to be released will be called “GeForce RTX 4090,” feature a somewhat scaled-down AD102 CPU, and most likely use around 450 watts. This places it in a comparable position to the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, despite the fact that it is anticipated to outperform that processor’s performance by as much as double as a result of being both denser and faster-clocked.

The GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, the top-tier product based on the AD102 GPU, is the subject of the information indicating a power demand of up to 600 watts. Although we haven’t seen or heard any mention of this design being released yet, there are undoubtedly preliminary versions of it.

That’s most likely the gadget that reputable leaker kopite7kimi refers to in the tweet above as “the beast.” The fact that he says it uses the AD102-450-A1 GPU suggests that it almost entirely occupies the AD102 die. In fact, he provides a shader specification for 18,176 FP32s, which is only two shader modules less than the whole 144-SM die that was revealed by the LAPSUS$ leak.

According to reports, “The beast” has 48GB—yes, forty-eight gigabytes—of GDDR6X memory that screams at 24 Gbps. A similar processor may be clocked as high as 3GHz, according to earlier claims. It’s hardly surprising that he lists the overall board power as “800W” given the high memory speed and even more outrageous GPU frequency.

If such a GPU were to be produced with those specifications, it would completely destroy everything else on the market, including all but the most powerful power supply. In fact, this GPU alone could be able to trip a circuit breaker in the majority of American houses due to the potential for transient spikes exceeding 1.6 kW.

Due to historical performance, we may assume that NVIDIA will keep this enormous monster ready and waiting in case rival AMD shocks Mean Green with its own terrifyingly large GPU. According to leaks and speculations, AMD’s next-generation components are anticipated to be competitive with the 450W version of AD102, but nothing that could compete with this power-hungry component has been mentioned.