Top Nvidia 40XX GPUs Rumoured to Require 450-850 Watts of Power!

With graphics cards getting more and more potent, it’s not exactly surprising to see that in order to achieve their impressive levels of performance it, generally, requires a pretty hefty amount of power. – Following a report via Videocardz, however, leak sources are claiming that the upcoming top-spec Nvidia 40XX GPUs (which are, of course, still pending confirmation) are going to take their power requirements to levels significantly greater than ever seen before. Put simply, figures of 450 to 850 watts are already being cited!

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40XX Graphics Cards

Following a Twitter post by ‘@greymon55‘, they have said that the top-spec Nvidia 40XX graphics cards (presumably the 4080, 4080 Ti, and 4090) will come with 450W, 650W, 850W TGPs respectively. – Now, just to clarify, a TGP (like a CPU TPD) does not necessarily directly correlate to how much power (wattage) they will consume and/or require. – The figures are, however, generally indicative of what kind of power supply consumers should be looking towards. And remember, a PSU doesn’t just power a graphics card. It is there to also get everything else running correctly!

While a follow-up post by ‘@kopite7kimi‘ has come back with slightly more sane figures of 400/600/800W, the bottom line is that regardless of who is correct, both are pretty much in agreeance here that, at the bare minimum, the upcoming 4080 will require even more power than the monster 3090, and the 4090 will likely require twice as much wattage (in full load) as the 4090!

What Do We Think?

We suspect that the information provided in these leaks is probably accurate. Why? Well, on a somewhat apparently unrelated subject, we’ve noticed that most of the confirmed PCIe Gen5 power supplies (the new power standard for next-gen GPUS) have come with wattage outputs of around 1000w-1300W. This would, therefore, seem to indicate that PSU manufacturers may already be aware that upcoming models (from Nvidia at least) are going to be notably hungrier than their predecessors.

This isn’t overly surprising either as the release of the top-spec Nvidia 30XX models did start to push the realistic minimum PSU wattage output requirements to around the 750-850 area. For the Nvidia 40XX series though, and particularly models like the 4080 Ti and 4090, it would appear that this is going to have to be taken further with 1,000-watt models seemingly representing a brand new minimum access point. Admittedly, not entirely ideal given how energy costs are going up, but what can you do?… As noted above, unfortunately we’re in the remits of graphics cards getting better, but clearly not more efficient!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!