ASUS RTX 4090D with 600W OC ends up faster than RTX 4090

ASUS has quietly enabled its region-specific RTX 4090 D graphics card to achieve higher-than-expected performance.

A quick reminder: the RTX 4090D is a special version of the existing model with a reduced core count and TDP to comply with U.S. export restrictions on high-performance chips to China. In reality, this means that the GPU has 14592 CUDA cores, which is 11% fewer cores than the original model. The TDP has been lowered by 25W to 425W. However, there is no change to the memory configuration.

Officially, all RTX 4090D graphics cards ship with NVIDIA reference specs, which means no factory overclocking and no dual-BIOS feature with higher clocks (it can adjust the fans though). Unofficially, it is relatively effortless to overclock the GPU to whatever the BIOS is unlocked to. In this case, this unlocking refers to the power limit settings, which we have already seen to be well above 500W for many of these cards.

RTX 4090D ROG STRIX, Source: HKEPC

Initially, any overclock of RTX 4090D showed negligible increases, ranging from 2 to 5% in performance, but this was due to low power limit increasing options. However, ASUS took it a step further by introducing 600W settings for its ROG STRIX model, which is physically identical to the original model but comes with a new AD102-250 GPU with fewer cores.

HKEPC, who tested the GPU, discovered that ASUS provided generous overclocking potential, which can be manually adjusted through software like GPU Tweak, ASUS’s own GPU info, and overclocking tool.

The reviewer has been able to set the GPU to 600W mode (a 41% higher power limit) and increase clocks by 200 MHz. The memory was overclocked from 1313 MHz to 1500 MHz (24 Gbps effective). Overall, the observed performance in 3DMark Speed Way goes from 9846 to 10818 points, nearly a 10% increase. This allowed the GPU to surpass the original RTX 4090.

RTX 4090D (Stock/OC), Source: HKEPC

As we have already mentioned, overclocking the RTX 4090D beyond the original model is not possible with most D variants on the market. This is mainly due to power restrictions. The ASUS ROG STRIX is an outlier, not something that should be taken into account with other models. Furthermore, just because the card is faster in synthetic benchmarks, it will not show a similar performance boost in games. In reality, there was very little difference between both models in gaming tests to begin with, so even a small overclock can easily put the performance back.

Source: HKEPC