Northwestrepair, a well-known hardware repair channel, released a maintenance video of the RTX 4090 FE public version, revealing a fact that has never been publicly reported before. NVIDIA has conducted at least one PCB revision during the life cycle of the RTX 4090, and a chip carried in the early batch was removed in subsequent versions.
It has been more than three years since the RTX 4090 was launched. This is the first time that a maintenance organization has publicly disclosed this hardware version difference.
The RTX 4090 FE sent for repair showed that it could not be turned on. The maintenance technician followed the normal procedures to check the short circuit, power supply connector, various voltages, PCIe detection logic and heat dissipation status. They even completely reballed the GPU, but the problem was not solved.
Finally used a thermal imager to locate the source of the fault, and found a small chip that was abnormally hot near the memory power supply circuit.
The key discovery followed. Compared with several RTX 4090 FE public version graphics cards in hand, this chip does not exist in all newer batches of public versions.
The technician confirmed that NVIDIA revised the PCB of the RTX 4090 FE at some point in time and removed this component. Since the video did not further explain the reason for the revision, it cannot be confirmed whether the chip is related to reliability issues.
Northwestrepair finally removed a similar-looking replacement chip from a Gigabyte graphics card, installed it into the RTX 4090 FE and successfully repaired it, and the graphics card lit up smoothly.