The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti will undoubtedly rank among the best graphics cards, but it could be set to blow away the competition in more ways than one. While the majority of the RTX 4000 flagship’s specs remain up in the air, one report suggests that the GPU is so power-hungry that it will need a wind farm for power.
We received a tip from wind turbine engineer Gus Towind, who claims to have personally installed PCIe Gen 5 power connectors suitable for the RTX 4090 Ti onto wind turbines across the United Kingdom. “I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years on the job,” Towind says “when the first work order arrived, I thought they were winding us up, but more and more just seemed to appear out of thin air. I don’t know if the grid’s going to handle it.”
It turns out that the installation contracts are predominantly coming from crypto miners, who have bought swathes of land surrounding the wind turbines with the intention of building a much less eco-friendly kind of farm.
There’s no word of official confirmation from Nvidia just yet, we’ve already seen some prospective RTX 4090 Ti buyers attempting to learn the ‘Song of Storms’ on an Ocarina. We’ve even seen evidence of people trying to relocate to Scotland in an effort to maximise their ‘bps’ (breeze per second), but their efforts have been met with resistance from concerned locals.
Hopefully this doesn’t set a new precedent for what makes the best power supply money can buy, or in this case cryptocurrency. However, given that the TDP of graphics cards seems to only increase from generation to generation, we wouldn’t be surprised if we needed a hydroelectric power plant to water cool it too.
Original image by Spy valley remixed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
