INNO3D RTX 4090 iChill X3 OC Review

Tear Down

Things get really interesting with this card when we tear down the cooler. The shroud and fans come away as a single piece and have three connections for power and RGB lighting and underneath this is where we find a single large heatsink which comprises a large vapour chamber to help dissipate heat away from the GPU core and GDDR6X memory through the 9 heatpipes of which two of them, that make contact towards the middle of the cold plate are much smaller, and terminate just above the PCB, while the other 7 span the length of the large cooler to help carry heat away from the PCB.

The heatsink also has a frame around it, holding it in place for rigidity, and to add extra stability to the PCB, as the heatsink is where the bulk of the weight comes from with its huge surface area of fins and that added bracket. There is another small bracket that adds strength to the end of the cooler, as this overhangs dead space, due to the small PCB, so adding extra reinforcement here was definitely a good idea, and goes to show that you have a great quality product that is better than what I’ve seen from bigger brands on the market.

Once the backplate is removed, it’s easy to see that it’s a lot thicker than other GPUs we’ve had through here, and again, it’s likely due to the large and heavy heatsink that’s been slapped on it to add extra support where needed.

The PCB looks to be a reference design and is pretty typical of what we’ve come to expect from this generation of GPUs, coming in at 200mm long and around 120mm high, so smaller than the Gaming OC from Gigabyte that we looked at. Though it’s small, the space looks to be utilised very well with a total of twelve Micro branded GDDR6X memory ICs, all with 2GB capacities.

At the top right of the PCB, we find our 12+4 pin power connector which is rated, due to the cable, at 600 watts, so more than enough for this particular card which has a total board power of 450 watts.

For the literal elephant in the room, we have the world’s first 4nm GPU core, codenamed Ada Lovelace with a 76.3 billion transistor count and 680mm² die size.

Each side includes 7 power phases giving us a total of 14 of which INNO3D decided to go for the Alpha & Omega AOZ5311NQI power stages which comprise two asymmetrical MOSFETS working in a high-side/low-side configuration for the best-optimised performance. Each power stage is rated for 55A of continuous output current, up to 80A for a 10ms (millisecond) pulse and up to 120A for a 10us (microsecond) pulse.

For the GDDR6X memory, the GPU has three controllers in total on the rear of the PCB and is all made by UPI Semiconductor. Two of them are variants of the uP9512 controller, while the other is the UPI uS5650Q which acts as a 4-channel analogue prefilter and multiplexer.