ACER has a very innovative GeForce RTX 4090 GPU that features built-in liquid cooling but fails to impress in thermal and noise tests, reports KitGuru.
ACER Has A Brilliant Idea To Cool The GeForce RTX 4090 GPU But Ends Up Lackluster In Its First Attempt
NVIDIA’s AIB partners have been doing exceptional work in engineering high-end and innovative cooling solutions. We have seen hybrid coolers, five-slot designs, and Noctua solutions in the market which aim to deliver better cooling for NVIDIA’s flagship GPUs such as the RTX 4090 and ACER is also innovating in this space. The company is a recent entrant in the DIY space but has shown its engineering expertise with the release of the Predator BiFrost series which combines axial & blower fans together on the same card.
Earlier this year, the company announced its plans to make additional high-end graphics cards in the NVIDIA and AMD segments. GamersNexus got an early look at these prototypes which included the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
Now, ACER has started shipping the cards within its latest Predator Orion X PCs and the first review unit of this high-end system was acquired by KitGuru who was more intrigued by the GPU housed within it. This card has no official name but since it is designed for the Predator systems, it may as well be called the ACER GeForce RTX 4090 Predator (POC).
The ACER GeForce RTX 4090 design is a triple-slot monster and almost as big as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. The card weighs slightly lower at 1.8kg versus the 2.19kg of the FE variant. It comes with a matte black plastic shroud with embedded RGB accent LEDs that are controlled by ACER’s Predator software and the two fans on the front are 100mm. There’s also a backplate on the card which is made out of metal. Power is provided through a single 16-pin 12VHPWR plug & display outputs including the standard 3 DP and 1 HDMI ports.
The card makes use of a 14+4 (GPU/VRAM) VRM design and sticks to a very reference design for the PCB. The cooler is the more interesting part of this graphics card as it incorporates a copper block which is attached directly to a water pump and a radiator. All of this assembly is done within the shroud itself. The radiator is said to measure 270x116x29mm. This design saves up space by not having to deal with an external radiator.
Kitguru proceeded to test the card’s clocks, thermals, and acoustics and the results came out to be rather disappointing. The ACER GeForce RTX 4090 Predator shipped with the reference clocks of 2235 MHz base and 2520 MHz boost but despite using such an innovative cooling design, it peaked out with a boost clock of 2644 MHz which was 36 MHz slower than the slowest RTX 4090 before it and over 100 MHz slower than similar liquid-cooled solutions.
In terms of temperatures, the ACER GeForce RTX 4090 Predator GPU was the hottest with the RTX 4090 Founders Edition coming in second place with a 4.4C lower temp on the GPU. The rest of the custom designs were much cooler.
Even worse are the memory (GDDR6X) temperatures which exceeded 90C and went up to 96C, a 12C difference versus the Founders Edition model. Finally, we have acoustics where the card ended up being the loudest among the bunch.
Gaming performance was pretty much the same as all other models with a few percentile differences since all 4090s perform the same. It’s the thermals and acoustics that matter for each model and here, the ACER Predator GPU came out as a disappointment, to say the least. The ACER Predator Orion-X PCs are not cheap and feature over $2000 US prices so a configuration with the RTX 4090 should easily round up around $5000 US. This is a high price to pay and if you’re getting this kind of GPU performance, then you are not going to be happy with your purchase.
Being ACER’s first liquid-cooled hybrid solution, it is evident that more tuning and refinement are required to make this a viable option for future releases. ACER did have a unique approach but we hope the next model using such coolers delivers better thermal/acoustics. Do check out the full in-depth testing by KitGuru in the video below:
News Sources: KitGuru, Videocardz