AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 WATERFORCE is tiny, but uses a 360mm AIO cooler

GIGABYTE has a monster graphics card in its behemoth AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 MASTER graphics card, but on the other side of the scale we have the small -- at least for the card -- powerhouse card with the upcoming AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 WATERFORCE graphics card.

The new AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 WATERFORCE has been teased with a tiny RTX 4090 card, but a large 360mm AIO cooler that will surely keep the next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU nice and cool.

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GIGABYTE is re-using the same look, design, and size as its current-gen Ampere-based AORUS GeForce RTX 3090 Ti WATERFORCE with the new AORUS RTX 4090 WATERFORCE. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because it's a good-looking card... and you get all that RTX 4090 horsepower in a smaller card (sans the huge 360mm AIO cooler).

• Read more: AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 MASTER is the biggest RTX 4090 so far, by far
• Read more: GIGABYTE has 11 custom GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards coming
• Read more: GIGABYTE's new GeForce RTX 4090 cards on sale in Hong Kong, right now

Inside, you've just got a much faster GPU -- NVIDIA's next-gen AD102 GPU powers the GeForce RTX 4090 -- while GIGABYTE is keeping things cool by using a 360mm AIO cooler that has 3 x 120mm fans, a large copper base plate, and 460mm long braided tubes.

It's not going to be complicated to install, but you're going to need to have the room to have a 360mm AIO cooler installed into your chassis... something that might be difficult if you're using a 360mm AIO cooler to keep your CPU cool. You'll have to make sure you've got room for both, or have a 240mm AIO radiator for your CPU and the 360mm AIO radiator for the GPU.

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GIGABYTE's new custom AORUS GeForce RTX 4090 WATERFORCE graphics card isn't the only AIO-cooled RTX 4090, with COLORFUL teasing its iGame GeForce RTX 4090 Neptune and MSI with its upcoming GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID graphics cards on the way.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4090 packs the AD102 GPU and has GPU boost clocks of 2.5GHz+ out of the box, while we should expect 3.0GHz+ and beyond with Ada Lovelace according to NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Jensen said during the GeForce RTX 40 series reveal event "GeForce Beyond" that the team has pushed Ada past 3GHz in the lab.

It will be interesting to see how AIO-cooled RTX 4090 graphics cards go against air-cooled RTX 4090 graphics cards, especially when we're hitting a huge 3.0GHz+ GPU clock.