Several months ago NVIDIA informed board partners of new SKU variants for the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 and at the time it was speculated there might be one in the works for its flagship card, despite not being announced, and now one has been spotted. A Redditor has posted images of their new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition showing the new GPU and its updated model ID. NVIDIA Redditor “cavitysearch123” (via VideoCardz) used GPU-Z to verify the AD102 variant which while retaining the same device PCI ID, showed a new Sub ID.
GPU-Z Screenshots
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition AD102-301
It was previously said that the new 301 variants were due to a new design that allowed the removal of something called a voltage “kicker” or “comparator circuit”. It had been theorized that the removal of this would lower the BOM but that, so far, has not been seen.
Surprisingly there was another change seen via MSI Afterburner. The voltage limit has been reduced from 1.1V to 1.07V. It is not yet known if this change is limited to just the Founders Edition or if custom PCBs from board partners will allow the previous voltage limit. It is also not known if this limit is due to other factors such as drivers or BIOS, etc., so until it has been verified by professional reviews this detail remains unconfirmed.
The poster said they have reached out to NVIDIA to see if it’s possible to flash the GPU with alternate BIOS in order to get to the higher limit but they are still awaiting a response. However, the poster did state that even at 1.07V they were still able to achieve overclock speeds above 3 GHz. They also attempted to flash the BIOS with an older version but again, were told the sub ID did not match and warned against doing it so the change was not made.
