NVIDIA Had Up To Four 16-Pin Connectors on Its GPU Prototypes For RTX 5090 & RTX 4090, Up To 2400W Power Delivery

Several NVIDIA PCB prototypes for RTX 5090, RTX 4090 & older GPUs have been spotted, featuring up to four 16-pin connectors.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 is currently the most power-hungry graphics card on the market, with up to 575W in rated TDP and consuming as much as 600W on certain AIB models. But even this beast is nothing compared to the prototypes that NVIDIA was testing internally, and we now have a first look at several of those units through Chiphell Forums.

The Forums give us a look at several PCB prototypes by the green team. First up is the AD102 "Ada Lovelace" prototype which was probably used for the RTX 4090 series. This card features four 16-pin connectors and a 45-phase power delivery, which is insane. Each 16-pin connector can sip up to 600W of power, so four of those can offer up to 2400W of power to the board. No variant with more than two of these connectors was ever released and the two 16-pin connector designs were limited to a few premium XOC designs.

We should also mention that just one of these connectors "12VHPWR" led to melting issues, so we can only imagine what four of these connectors are going to end up doing to the card.

Besides the AD102 prototype PCB, we also get a look at the GA102 "Ampere" board with 4x 8-pin connectors, GA104 with 3x 8-pin connectors, GA107 with 1x 8-pin connectors and also a few older Turing "RTX 20" and Pascal "GTX 10" series prototypes which give us an idea of what testing methods NVIDIA used in finalizing the retail boards for each respective generation.

What's more interesting is that NVIDIA also seemingly had a prototype PCB featuring the flagship GB202 GPU (RTX 5090) with four 16-pin connectors. There is a possibility that we might see a max of dual 16-pin connectors on certain XOC models which are expected to roll out in the coming months, but don't expect any model with 3, let alone 4 of these power plugs.

Also, it should be pointed out that these are just prototypes, and GPU manufacturers such as NVIDIA work on a ton of PCB and Cooler prototypes for test/evaluation purposes. The company even had several new PCB and cooling technology prototypes devised for RTX 40 and RTX 50 GPUs as revealed in the official Founders Edition design video here.

It's the same way they decide on various GPU SKUs before finalizing which SKU will make it to retail based on cost, performance, and efficiency aspects.

News Sources: Chiphell Forums #1, Chiphell Forums #2, HXL