Impatient for Nvidia’s RTX 5090 to arrive? This ‘frankenGPU’ that’s basically an RTX 4090 Super will whet your appetite nicely

The importance of faster VRAM

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A team of intrepid modders at Teclab have created an RTX 4090 Super, or the equivalent, concocting a kind of ‘frankenGPU’ which is a considerable chunk faster than the stock Lovelace flagship graphics card.

You might recall there wererumors flying around for a long while about an RTX 4090 Ti(which was assumed to be the name back then, before the Super variants for Lovelace emerged), so it’s interesting to see this finally happen – well, kind of.

The ‘RTX 4090 Super’ in question is 13% faster than thestock RTX 4090asWccftechreports, but it’s actually an AD102 GPU (the chip in the RTX 4090) housed in the circuit board of an RTX 3090 Ti, with video RAM taken from anRTX 4080 Super.

Specifically, the board is from a Galax RTX 3090 Ti HOF OC model, a high-end board with premium components built for sturdy overclocking, and it has the AD102 chip in place alongside GDDR6X VRAM from the RTX 4080 Super running at 24Gbps.

With that VRAM subsequently overclocked to nearly 26Gbps, and a bunch of other tuning applied, in the Unigine Superposition benchmark at8Kresolution, the supercharged RTX 4090 was 13% faster compared to the normal RTX 4090.

However, with the GPU also overclocked to 3GHz, that lead was extended to 16%, a more than healthy difference for a ‘Super’ take on a graphics card.

Analysis: Speed demons

This is a nifty experiment from Teclab, and it shows what we could have had ifNvidiahad given the Super treatment to the highest-end Lovelace GPU instead of stopping at the RTX 4080 Super. Of course, for this generation, the RTX 4090 was plenty powerful enough anyway – and arguably for the next-gen, too, in many respects, although a much more powerful flagship is still inbound with Blackwell graphics cards.

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If the rumors are right, we’ll see theRTX 5090later in 2024 (and likely the RTX 5080 too, andthat may even arrive slightly ahead of the next-gen flagship). And what’s interesting with this mod is we can see the effects of faster video RAM quite clearly illustrated, and Blackwell will go further in this regard, loading up with cutting-edge GDDR7 memory. This will hit 28Gbps (or indeed even faster) and offers awhole raft of performance advancementsas already teased to a considerable extent.

Expectations for theRTX 5090 to be a big leapfrom the RTX 4090 are still riding high, and much faster VRAM will be an important part of the frame rate boosts that Nvidia’s next-gen flagship GPU will doubtless deliver.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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