Using the stock RTX 3090, modders have created a super GPU that is 39% faster than the 4090 with memory upgrades and overclocking.
NVIDIA upgraded its high-end RTX 40-series GPUs this year with refreshed “Super” variants, but left the RTX 4090 untouched. However, a team of modders managed to create a GPU that’s faster than a regular RTX 4090 by making their own version.
Modders Say RTX 4090 Is 39% Faster
NVIDIA’s Super cards have always featured upgraded memory subsystems, so modders have focused on this area of the RTX 4090. The team at TecLab on YouTube built a GPU that required them to transplant the RTX 4090 die from a different GPU onto a new printed circuit board (PCB), take the memory from an RTX 4080 Super GPU, pop it onto the card, and then overclock it. The team behind the project has released a video explaining the experiment in Portuguese.
The GPU’s components are a 4090 die transplanted onto the PCB from an RTX 3090 Ti HOF from Galax, the company’s flagship overclocking card. The modders swapped out the 3090 Ti’s 21Gbps GDDR6X memory for the 23Gbps memory from an RTX 4080 Super, and then overclocked it to 26Gbps. Using Unigine’s Superposition 8K benchmark, the modified card scored 39% higher than stock with everything overclocked and detail-level optimizations. However, when just the memory was overclocked to 26Gbps, the card ran 13% faster than stock, proving that a memory upgrade alone can provide a significant boost in performance.
The ability of memory alone to boost performance is remarkable. Micron says its new GDDR7 memory can increase frames per second by more than 30%. Micron is expected to release GDDR7 at 28Gbps and 32Gbps speeds for its next-generation GPUs this year, but it’s unclear which version NVIDIA will use for its 50-series at launch. Rumors suggest it will stick with 28Gbps, so it can upgrade that when the Super cards arrive in late 2025.