Tech YouTuber cuts RTX 4090 in half “for science”

YouTuber GamersNexus, known for their in-depth commentary on the latest hardware, recently cut an RTX 4090 in half, to analyze its thermal design.

Steve Burke of GamersNexus is known for many things, their investigative reporting blew the lid off of the reported internal mismanagement of Artesian Builds, on some corners of the internet, they dub him ‘Tech Jesus’, for his iconic long hair.

In one of his recent videos on the GamersNexus YouTube channel, Burke sits down with Malcolm Gutenburg, a Thermal Engineer at Nvidia to see what’s going on inside the RTX 4090, by cutting the cooler in two using a high-pressure water jet.

In the video, Burke, and Gutenberg go through several different RTX 4090 cooling designs for the Founders Edition model of the upcoming graphics card. They showcased multiple fan designs, in addition to a dissected vapor chamber which they cut in half using a water jet “for science”. The video is full of dense analysis of the thermal design, and is interesting if you want to understand what makes these pieces of cutting-edge tech tick.

These GPUs obviously were just prototype samples of the cooler. and were not working RTX 4090 GPUs, so no wasted silicon here.

Nvidia shakes up Founders Edition GPU cooling designs

Youtube / GamersNexus

The video continues to go through several differences and iterations that Nvidia made in the process of designing the RTX 4090 Founders Edition cooler, which is gargantuan. However, every inch of this GPU needed to be adequately cooled in order to handle high-wattage operation. The RTX 4090 is poised to be one of the fastest graphics cards in Nvidia’s 40-series of graphics cards.

The video goes in-depth with the thermal design and iterative analysis that Nvidia performed at every step, comparing the RTX 3090 cooler to the RTX 4090. This results in the cooler that we’re hopefully going to see launch on October 12. Whether or not the cards remain cool under sustained loads is something that we’re just going to have to wait and see when reviews of the Founders Edition model finally come out next week.