Overclocked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090D GPU Matches The RTX 4090 FE Despite Being A “Restricted Feature”

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090D for China has seemingly been overclocked and ends up with a performance that matches the 4090 FE.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090D GPU was launched in China as a means to offer high-end gamers a flagship product that fully complied with the US export regulation policies. During the launch, we noted how all AIBs had been restricted from enabling factory overclocks on these cards. This meant that the clock speeds and power limits of each card were going to be set at the stock specs set by NVIDIA.

Despite its reduced specifications, clocks, and power limits, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090D GPU still managed to offer up to 95% of the performance of the RTX 4090 FE (Founders Edition) variant. This is a good thing especially when the retail MSRP of the card is set at the same price as the 4090 FE that came before it. So it wouldn't be a good value if users were paying the same money of a FE model for a card that performed much slower.

With that said, it looks like a few AIB models such as the ASUS GeForce RTX 4090D ROG STRIX, have an ace up their sleeves. During tests conducted by HKEPC, it was revealed that the ROG STRIX variant allows the TGP to be unlocked from the standard 425W to up to 600W (+141%). This TGP restriction is unlocked from the ASUS GPU Tweak III application.

At default settings, the unlocked TGP resulted in a nominal boost for the ASUS GeForce RTX 4090D ROG STRIX GPU but with a GPU clock adjustment of +200 MHz, memory clock adjustment of +187 MHz, and backed by an unconstrained TGP, the graphics card scored a +9.3% improvement in the 3DMark Speedway benchmark which puts it ahead of the RTX 4090 FE model.

ASUS GeForce RTX 4090D ROG STRIX (Default Settings / Credits: HKEPC):

ASUS GeForce RTX 4090D ROG STRIX (600W TGP Unlock / Manual OC / Credits: HKEPC):

The highest GP recorded was 558.4W (+131.4%) & the clocks were reported at 3045 MHz. Using the same settings, a performance improvement of up to +8.7% was also showcased in 3DMark Port Royal benchmarks. It is unclear which other models allow similar TGP and overclocking tweaks but it is definitely great for gamers in China who want to achieve performance on par or better than the 4090 FE despite the cut-down specifications. With that said, the ASUS ROG STRIX OC is a crazy expensive model that retails for 16,999 RMB and sometimes even more in China. That's around $2350 US (+$250 more than the US MSRP).

News Source: HKEPC