Up To 1200W PSU Recommended For Some RTX 4090s
With the recent release of the RTX 40 series graphics cards, PSU requirements are popping up and some 4090s are wanting a minimum of 1000w up to 1200w.
It is no surprise that the RTX 4090 will require a beefy power supply, following on from the 3090 Ti that recommended a 700w PSU. Some AIBs (add-in board) stick to Nvidia’s recommendation of 850w, yet some of them say that a minimum of 1000w or even 1200w is needed.
| Models | Target Board Power | Minimum PSU Wattage |
| Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC | Unknown | 1000W |
| Aorus RTX 4090 Master | Unknown | 1000W |
| MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X, Suprim Liquid X | Unknown | 850W |
| PNY RTX 4090 Verto Epic-X | 450W | 850W |
| Zotac RTX 4090 AMP Extreme, Trinity | 450W | 1000W |
| Galax RTX 4090 SG, ST | Unknown | 850W |
| All Colorful RTX 4090 Models | Unknown | Unknown |
| Inno3D RTX 4090 X3 OC iChill Black | Unknown | 850W |
| Palit RTX 4090 GameRock OC | 450W | 1200W |
| Gainward RTX 4090 Phantom GS | Unknown | Unknown |
As you can see in the graph above, the outlier is the Palit GameRock OC that is recommending a massive 1200w PSU. That is the biggest PSU requirement that any GPU company has issued so far. The only thing that would beat this is if you were to run the GTX 980 Ti in quad SLI, but then that is four cards compared to just a single one now wanting 1200w.
Palit did not say why they recommended a 1200W PSU, but it could be assumed that their test setup used a power hungry CPU such as an overclocked i9-12900K. So when shopping for your new Nvidia RTX 4090, keep in mind that you’ll need to spend a bit to upgrade your power supply to keep up with the demand.
