A Chinese social media user has shared images of what looks like a production line full of Zotac GeForce RTX 4090 Amp Extreme 'Airo' graphics cards, and another image displays a stack of branded packaging sleeves. These are further clues that Nvidia will announce RTX 4090 on September 20 at GTC, and the GPU looks poised to claim the top spot on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.
Baidu user Koko 218 commented only upon the designs being “ugly.” We'll be more diplomatic and say they do look quite unique. Swooping curves suggest a more aerodynamic design, which would make sense if we were looking at a car rather than potentially one of the best graphics cards. We'll have to wait and see how the design actually performs before coming to any hard conclusions, naturally.
If these images are genuine, what we are seeing here are Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards from the long running Amp Extreme family. Thankfully, the packaging photo is clear enough to pick out some further details such as:
- This triple fan card features an IceStorm 3.0 cooler
- Dual-BIOS support for configuration flexibility
- Spectra 2.0 RGB lighting is present
- Freeze fan stop technology kicks in when the GPU is idling
- Zotac’s Firestorm UI for tuning and overclocking
Sadly, an area on the carton which might have outlined the graphics card specifications is too small to be able to pick out any details. You can check our Nvidia RTX 40-Series and Ada GPUs hub for further speculation on what the actual specs might be.
Turning to the matter of appearance, the purported Zotac GeForce RTX 4090 Amp Extreme has a rounded façade, almost like a wind-tunnel inspired design. It is pleasingly minimal from this angle. However, it's definitely a bulky beast, as we can just make out the triple slot bracket and it looks like the card may be even a bit wider, extending into 4-slot territory.
The triple-slot card has some significant cutouts where the last fan pushes air directly through an array of aluminum fins laced with heatpipes. The PCB appears to be about as long as a twin fan graphics card. The back of the GPU and its ICs are also left exposed by a cut-out in the backplate. Power inputs are on the obscured side of the card, so we can’t see how many of the rumored high-density 16-pin power connector ports are fitted. Overall, the backplate looks somewhat overdesigned, which probably resulted in the negative social media comments.
Nvidia is widely expected to launch the first Ada Lovelace architecture graphics cards, forming this RTX 40 series, at the GeForce Beyond event, which kicks-off a week from tomorrow (Sept. 20). The RTX 4090 will likely be the pioneering SKU, hence leaks like this, and our earlier report of Gigabyte RTX 4090 models appearing on the EEC database.
Nvidia's next GPU series and architecture could end up being the biggest jump in generational performance that we've ever seen from Team Green. Based on rumored specifications, raw compute could improve by anywhere from 50 to 100% at the top of the stack. A lot of that will depend on GPU clock speeds, which so far we don't have hard numbers on. We should find out plenty more by next week.
