The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is an expensive card, currently floating around $2,000. But famous overclocker and YouTuber Roman Hartung, better known as der8auer, recently spent $16,000 on an Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 — except that money all went to charity.
The ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 that der8auer won was part of an auction held by Asus to celebrate the launch of the card. The proceeds went to Make-a-Wish International, a charity that helps fulfill the wishes of children undergoing critical medical treatment.
This particular RTX 4090 is signed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. According to a post on X (the site formerly known as Twitter), Asus stated that der8auer also won an ROG Matrix NFT — because, apparently, we're all stuck in 2021.
Congrats @der8auer, the top bidder in our ROG Matrix Charity Auction! His USD16K bid secures the #ROGMatrix #RTX4090 graphics card, signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, and a ROG Matrix NFT. Thanks for supporting @makeawishintl & granting wishes of kids globally! #ROGMatrixAuction pic.twitter.com/YCidLZMf45November 21, 2023
The charity auction started back in September, and Asus said that initial bids climbed to $10,000 on the first day.
"I’ve been a collector of Matrix cards for a long time, so I’m so excited to add this extra-special ROG Matrix 4090 to the collection," der8auer said in Asus' press release. "And to have the money go to a great cause like Make-A-Wish is just the cherry on top."
The ROG Matrix RTX 4090 is a premium card without Huang's signature on it. The GPU typically costs $3,199, so der8auer paid a $12,800 premium for the charity auction prize. The GPU has a 360 mm radiator attached to watercool the GPU, which is set to a 2,700 MHz frequency out of the box (that's higher than Nvidia's own 2,520 MHz). The Matrix also utilizes a 24-phase VRM and a custom circuit board and a cold plate to support the power and heat needed to support the high speeds. Asus is the first to use liquid metal on a consumer GPU.
We'll see if der8auer keeps this special edition GPU in his collection, but since it's designed for extreme overclockers, it wouldn't be surprising to see him attempt to break some records with it. Since the card's announcement at Computex earlier this year, Asus has already claimed a number of records in benchmarks across the 3DMark suite and in Unigine Superposition.
We last saw der8auer helping to overclock the AMD Threadripper Pro 7995WX, using liquid nitrogen to hit 6.0 GHz on all of the CPU's 96 cores and breaking world records on Cinebench.
