NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition Unboxing

For all intents and purposes, the Founders Edition graphics cards sold directly by NVIDIA, are reference-design cards, although the company doesn't consider them to be. NVIDIA does keep a real reference-design board for each of its new GPUs, which it shares with OEMs as engineering samples during product development. Some of these designs even make it to the prebuilt desktop OEM market. The idea behind Founders Edition is to give the DIY PC enthusiast crowd a formidable custom-design directly from NVIDIA, not built to a cost, but to set design and capability standards for the other board partners.


The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" Founders Edition comes in a large cuboidal box that's bigger than it looks. This is very likely the box design of the retail RTX 4090 Founders Edition, and isn't a media-kit. You can tell so looking at the label behind the box, which has barcodes like the ones you'd see on retail boxes, besides various regulatory/safety marks, system requirements, and other basic information in multiple languages—characteristics of a retail box.


Although cuboidal in shape, the box doesn't open along its sides. Rather its two halves cleave diagonally along the sides, as shown above. The card is nestled in a foam insert with a graphic sheet on top.


Once you pull the card out, the foam insert has a cavity for a smaller box with accessories and documentation.


This box contains the all-important four 8-pin PCIe to 12+4 pin adapter, and some very basic documentation that points you to NVIDIA support, as well as guides you on how to use the power adapter.


NVIDIA is the only supplier of power adapters bundled with RTX 40-series graphics cards, be it the Founders Edition or custom-design boards by partners. The one included with this card converts four 150 W 8-pin PCIe power connectors to a 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector that's capable of delivering 600 W (continuous) to the card.

The Card

Here it is! The GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition in all its glory. It features a very similar board design to that of the RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition. This is because NVIDIA is retaining the Dual-Axial Flow-Through cooler architecture from the previous-generation. The company has a record of doing this with its FE cards (eg: the GTX TITAN spanning the Kepler and Maxwell generations). There are of course several updates to the cooler's design which we'll detail in our review. The most evident of these is the fan design, which has been improved and enlarged for higher airflow.


The card draws power from a 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is capable of 600 W continuous power-delivery, with +100% excursions (spikes). Display outputs include three DisplayPorts and an HDMI.


The GeForce RTX 4090 uses a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface, even though its power architecture conforms to PCIe Gen 5 specs. The tail end of the card has a small lid that covers the mounting holes for a support rail, used in certain workstation form-factors such as the x86 Mac Pro.


Here's a closer look at the new fan-design being introduced with the RTX 4090 FE. This is an improvement over the one the RTX 3090 Ti FE comes with. There's no RGB bling, but the GeForce RTX logo lights up in white.


Here are some of the finer details in the card's design.


As with the previous-generation, the card's design involves an 8-shaped alloy frame that holds an aluminium fin-stack. This fin-stack makes up most of the cooler's volume. Fresh air drawn in from the first fan is vented from the sides of the front end of the card, while the second fan draws air through the fin-stack, venting it upward. The various heatsink elements are skewered by six heat pipes that make contact with a vapor-chamber plate that pulls heat from the GPU and memory.


The card is exactly 30.5 cm in length and 3 slots thick. It weighs 2.181 kg.

Size Comparisons

The RTX 4090 FE seems mammoth (which it is), but is actually shorter in length than the RTX 3090 FE. You'll also notice in the first picture above, that the fans are actually larger than the ones in the predecessor, pushing all the way to the edges. Both the RTX 4090 FE and RTX 3090 FE completely dwarf their predecessors, the RTX 2080 Ti FE, and the GTX 1080 Ti FE. The RTX 4090 FE is exactly 3 slots thick, and no more. The card not only takes up 3 slots in your system, but also has rear I/O mounting for all three (so 3 screws and the PCIe slot retention clip hold it in place).


It's also larger than AMD's largest MBA (made by AMD) reference cards for the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT.