Acer Wants EVGA's Spot - RTX 4090 with 3-Slot Water Cooling & AMD RX [REDACTED]
**Acer 4090: An Engineering Sample**
The Acer 4090 is an engineering sample of the company's latest graphics card, designed to showcase its features and design. The unit was obtained by Gamers Nexus, who were able to disassemble it and reveal its inner workings.
One notable feature of the Acer 4090 is its contact patch, which is significantly flatter than previous designs. This allows for better pressure distribution and improved thermal performance. The use of Torx screws and micro fins on the cold plate also enhances heat transfer. The radiator dimensions are 227 mil wide and 22 mil thick, keeping it within the three-slot sizing.
The radiator has a shroud component, which is a plastic embellishment, as well as contact plates that connect to the rest of the system. These plates provide additional surface area for the GPU's fins, allowing for more efficient heat transfer. The unit also features dual pumps, which are located on one side of the board.
**Design and Engineering**
The Acer 4090's design is a result of the company's efforts to create a high-performance graphics card without relying on complex custom designs. Instead, they use stack pads and standard thermal materials to achieve their goals. The use of these components allows for easier manufacturing and reduced costs. However, this approach also means that the final product may not offer the same level of performance as a custom-designed GPU.
The unit's engineering sample design includes features such as stacked throttle pads and memory sharing between the GPU and cold plates. The vrm is also sinking into these contact plates, which helps to dissipate heat more efficiently. The contact patch for the mosfets is particularly interesting, with a fin stack that provides additional surface area.
**Disassembly and Inspection**
The Acer 4090 was found to be relatively easy to disassemble, with only one screw holding it together in place of the usual four or five screws. This suggests that the final product may be more securely fastened than this engineering sample. Once disassembled, the unit revealed its inner workings, including the pumps and radiator.
The filling port is located on the back of the unit, which could potentially be used for future designs. The PCB above the filling port appears to be for an LED, while the fan wiring is located elsewhere. The unit's internal design is largely straightforward, with most components in a linear configuration.
**Conclusion**
The Acer 4090 is an interesting example of how engineering samples can provide insight into the design process behind high-performance graphics cards. While not intended for retail sale, it offers a unique look at the inner workings of this upcoming GPU. Gamers Nexus hopes to test the unit standalone in the future, providing more information about its performance and features.
If you're interested in learning more about the Acer 4090 or similar projects, be sure to check out Gamers Nexus' other videos on their website or Patreon channel. By supporting the channel, you can help enable the creation of more content like this in the future.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone so this is one of our videos from the Acer HQ there's we're actually in the design center we have some cool shots from around the design center of some of the rapid prototyping tools really interesting space maybe we'll talk about it in more depth in a future video but for now what we've already covered and should be on the channel is the Orion X particularly interesting mini ITX chassis and uh the difference from when we showed it last time is now there's no video card in it and that's because we're going to take it apart so uh this already on the channel I'm not going to spend more time on it in this video what we're focusing on today is the video cards if you saw our previous coverage I want to say it might be the only time we've covered an Acer product I'm not sure I don't think we've done a pre-built but we covered the arc GPU and the arc GPU was actually pretty interesting and unique design the thing that caught our eye for it and the reason we bought it to even test was one because Intel Arc and the only other vendor at the time was basically ASRock and then two it had the mix of blower fan and axial fan so that's already on the channel but Acer is clearly trying to get more into video card design and that's what we're looking at today with a teardown of this 4090 that has a liquid cooler built in and I've also got a future AMD design that we can briefly show but because it's it's early in design we can't go too much into details because stuff may change so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by montex metal dt24 base this two fan Tower cooler keeps a simple black and metal look to match most build Aesthetics and it runs a six heat pipe design with two towers and two fans for a higher performance air coolant the metal dt24 base can also accommodate taller memory modules because it cuts back the fin stack closest to the first dim slot the metal dt24 base uses a standard mounting mechanism and is easy to install learn more at the link in the description below okay so this is the one of Interest today we get to take this apart and the the number one disclaimer here this is an engineering sample so this is used for design decisions for initial testing and it's not a final production sample which means you're going to see some cosmetic damage from use in testing but it's not representative of the final we'll probably look at the final once we get the Orion X and with that out of the way the reason this is interesting is once again because they've got a three slot design here and for cooling it's two axial fans which if I recall are 100 millimeters 10 centimeter fans those are attached to a shroud underneath it is a liquid or a radiator which has the Dual pump on one end of the radiator rather than centrally last time we saw radiators and cards were the fury X as an example which was probably the probably a mistake AMD won't make again and then the Alienware card with the weird expansion thing so this one's fully integrated Center's got the cold plate uh we're gonna check it out internally but before taking this one apart let's look briefly at this one we're not going to take this apart today because it's just too early in design to really get into so this is a triple axial design it's much more standard in that regard they've got some interesting shroud in here so rather than taking the whole shroud area surface area and coming out to the full edges they've basically just kind of chamfered the edges around the fans and section them off this is I mean as you can see a Radeon design Acer is still working on it this is an early prototype so it's not final yet things will change but just from noticing what they've got going on right now is base plate here base plate extends and comes all the way across this is a wide uh PCB So in theory the full PCB should be populated I actually see an unpopulated uh connector over here as well and it's not going to be a flow through at least right now and assuming nothing changes but instead of more traditional three axle fan into the PCB with exhaust coming vertically top and bottom of the fin stack which is fully exposed here and this it seems like manufacturers have kind of finally figured out but there's a period where X of X in particular they were all blocking the vertical fin stack just like they set up a fin stack to exhaust vertically and then they would blow all the air into a plastic shroud which was terrible and it didn't work and I think we finally figured that out as an industry so this one is kept more open which you know should be a given but with companies entering the space they don't necessarily always do uh what the incumbents know at this point Acer is going in the right direction with that so we'll probably be looking at this one once it comes out too let's get into the 40 90. I have not done any kind of preview or pre-briefing on this so we're gonna figure it all out together here today there are a couple screws that are removed already and as I said that's because it's an engineering sample so this won't be fully representative but it'll be pretty close four screws here going into the Coldplay area retaining probably that whole heat sink to the PCB I see also you can tell from the markings here there's going to be a couple screws underneath where the screws coming up and through the PCB and into the back plate probably so we'll find that on the edges here we've got a couple that actually that one's unscrewed already I've got a couple that are going through the PCB and into a retention plate the radiator these designs are always interesting to me because they can they work really well or they can work really not well and you don't know until you test it um but with 4090s there's just so much heat flux uh and power to deal with becoming more beneficial I don't think this screw is supposed to be this chewed up but that's the back plate back plates free no cables so there's a back plate design it looks like some some area for air to come throughout the back over here but otherwise pretty simple design because this isn't a final retail sample and we would have to um look at a retail one to make commentary on things like thermal pads and their presence for the back you can see inductor line here mosfet line there's another one over here so they've got a vrm on both sides of the GPU it's actually really beneficial for a higher power larger core designs for the bigger silicon because as you're as the voltage regulator is handling the power delivery to the GPU core splitting across two halves of the PCB allows higher efficiency reaching the different parts of the core that it needs to reach and then memory memory vrm we'll look at once we get to the other side let's pull these four screws nothing particularly interesting On The Backs pretty standard it's a couple a couple controllers but this is so far going quickly I think we're probably going to take these out next actually the i o plate is pretty interesting on its own there's a ton of punched out holes on it which is good that allows air to get through and otherwise it's a 3D P1 HDMI I'm glad we have video evidence that there's already screws missing so that I can't be blamed for it later and they are using this is actually also noteworthy Acer is using the full three slot bracket uh for some reason this is not common for three slot video cards a lot of them end up running just a two slot bracket for the the larger card so these actually Nvidia made a really big point about this in their own Fe design where Nvidia uh was attributing in a lot of the structural rigidity to go in for full three slot to help prevent some of the SAG on the card along with their x-frame I think does it separate now I'll try yeah I might do the fan cables yeah oh yeah yeah just pulling the fan cables a lot going on on this PCB so for table and first of all I got three cables running to the board that I can see anyway and one of these is going to be for pump at least and the other two are probably for for fans LEDs things like that uh board layout so we've got 12 volt high power up here a couple shunt resistors up there as well two milliohm shunt resistors as a 5 milliamp shunt resistor down here if you wanted then there's another five milliamp up here so um options remain if you wanted to short those to increase the power Target which might make sense on this given that it's liquid cooled assuming the cooling works well 490 fat die and that is attached directly to actually let's just get this cable out of here securely always pull at the housing okay okay all right so here's the cooler points of interest colblate has a protruding copper block brick that comes out to contact the GPU core you see this sometimes and the old ebj clcs this was actually the EVGA hybrid clcs this was actually really beneficial for them the reason it worked great for evgas is because they were able to flatten the contact patch much better than on the acetec uh like concentric rain plate that they used to use because with gpus there's a little bit of a curvature to it but this is this is significantly flatter than say an IHS or something on a CPU so sometimes these protrusions I don't know if this is why Acer did it or not but it can be beneficial for improving the the contact the flatness and the pressure distribution you see the some Torx screws here that are attaching the cold plate to it looks like where the the micro fins yeah so opposite side this cold plate there's gonna be micro fins inside of the um the block I guess there's no pump in there it's not a pump block and then is it I'm assuming this side with the uh pumps yeah so dual pump over here and it looks like you can actually see them so this uh plastic protrusion here and then there's another one here that's probably where the pumps are located so for radiator Dimensions just got this from the team here so it ends up being a 227 mil wide so you've almost got like a 240. thickness is 22 mil and that keeps it within the three slot sizing they've got some shroud components here that are just plastic embellishments there's couple screws that look like they this may be more of an engineering sample artifact here but contact connecting these plates to the rest of the radiator um I'm guessing this has liquid in it right this this has a liquid in it yeah okay so so I won't take that off then yeah yeah yeah I'll leave it yeah I'll leave that on so uh so this is actually a I guess a functioning unit it's got liquid in it we're not going to take this out and look at the micro pens the microphones are pretty standard though more evidence of engineering samples so this is kind of a cool story in terms of seeing what goes on to design a product because they've got Stacks throttle pads on thermal pads which in an end product you would ideally never do this you would just get a custom made Pad but the thicker pads when you're at like four Miller are not uh not normally off the shelf or easy to get so stack pads there but otherwise memory is all sharing the GPU cold plates the memories effectively cooled by liquid as well the vrm is sinking into these contact plates which I don't know how well we can show this I'll try and show this camera so at the bottom from our perspective of the contact patch for the mosfets there's actually a fin stack and that's true for the one over here as well so there's some extra surface area they've hidden down in here to leverage more of the space and then it does eventually connect to the liquid coolant to the radiator um so I mean I think that really more or less shows it there's not much Point taking the rest of this off although there is only one screw holed in the den so we might as well normally I would just stop there but let's just take the one screw out it may be held in by a cable nope okay cool that's pretty cool okay I was gonna make a call that's really easy to disassemble but I don't there would be a there would be more screws in the final so here's where the uh block ends up living there's the pumps this could be used as a fill Port uh uh if they can manufacturing that's used if it's if it's left with that cap screw and then as a user you could refill it as well inside of the housing here so there's some um actually not foam so this is the the bracket for the fans there's a pla a PCB up here which I'm assuming is for an LED and uh then the the fan wiring which um because the engineering sample uh I won't I won't comment on the uh the wiring right now but I think that's pretty much it so that's the Acer 4090 this is not being sold Standalone right now but Acer's plan is to try and move towards more Standalone video cards so you see that with The Arc stuff sale with the AMD one we showed you for a future project uh Nvidia is a little picky here about who gets to put nvidia's name on things so I don't know if they've gotten through that process yet but either way if you're interested in this type of stuff basically Post in the comments because uh that's the only way it gets out of out of this box and onto just a retail listing so anyway we'll try and test it Standalone once it's done regardless thanks for watching check out the other video on the channel go to store.gamesaccess.net or patreon.com Gamers Nexus stops out directly and we'll see you all next timehey everyone so this is one of our videos from the Acer HQ there's we're actually in the design center we have some cool shots from around the design center of some of the rapid prototyping tools really interesting space maybe we'll talk about it in more depth in a future video but for now what we've already covered and should be on the channel is the Orion X particularly interesting mini ITX chassis and uh the difference from when we showed it last time is now there's no video card in it and that's because we're going to take it apart so uh this already on the channel I'm not going to spend more time on it in this video what we're focusing on today is the video cards if you saw our previous coverage I want to say it might be the only time we've covered an Acer product I'm not sure I don't think we've done a pre-built but we covered the arc GPU and the arc GPU was actually pretty interesting and unique design the thing that caught our eye for it and the reason we bought it to even test was one because Intel Arc and the only other vendor at the time was basically ASRock and then two it had the mix of blower fan and axial fan so that's already on the channel but Acer is clearly trying to get more into video card design and that's what we're looking at today with a teardown of this 4090 that has a liquid cooler built in and I've also got a future AMD design that we can briefly show but because it's it's early in design we can't go too much into details because stuff may change so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by montex metal dt24 base this two fan Tower cooler keeps a simple black and metal look to match most build Aesthetics and it runs a six heat pipe design with two towers and two fans for a higher performance air coolant the metal dt24 base can also accommodate taller memory modules because it cuts back the fin stack closest to the first dim slot the metal dt24 base uses a standard mounting mechanism and is easy to install learn more at the link in the description below okay so this is the one of Interest today we get to take this apart and the the number one disclaimer here this is an engineering sample so this is used for design decisions for initial testing and it's not a final production sample which means you're going to see some cosmetic damage from use in testing but it's not representative of the final we'll probably look at the final once we get the Orion X and with that out of the way the reason this is interesting is once again because they've got a three slot design here and for cooling it's two axial fans which if I recall are 100 millimeters 10 centimeter fans those are attached to a shroud underneath it is a liquid or a radiator which has the Dual pump on one end of the radiator rather than centrally last time we saw radiators and cards were the fury X as an example which was probably the probably a mistake AMD won't make again and then the Alienware card with the weird expansion thing so this one's fully integrated Center's got the cold plate uh we're gonna check it out internally but before taking this one apart let's look briefly at this one we're not going to take this apart today because it's just too early in design to really get into so this is a triple axial design it's much more standard in that regard they've got some interesting shroud in here so rather than taking the whole shroud area surface area and coming out to the full edges they've basically just kind of chamfered the edges around the fans and section them off this is I mean as you can see a Radeon design Acer is still working on it this is an early prototype so it's not final yet things will change but just from noticing what they've got going on right now is base plate here base plate extends and comes all the way across this is a wide uh PCB So in theory the full PCB should be populated I actually see an unpopulated uh connector over here as well and it's not going to be a flow through at least right now and assuming nothing changes but instead of more traditional three axle fan into the PCB with exhaust coming vertically top and bottom of the fin stack which is fully exposed here and this it seems like manufacturers have kind of finally figured out but there's a period where X of X in particular they were all blocking the vertical fin stack just like they set up a fin stack to exhaust vertically and then they would blow all the air into a plastic shroud which was terrible and it didn't work and I think we finally figured that out as an industry so this one is kept more open which you know should be a given but with companies entering the space they don't necessarily always do uh what the incumbents know at this point Acer is going in the right direction with that so we'll probably be looking at this one once it comes out too let's get into the 40 90. I have not done any kind of preview or pre-briefing on this so we're gonna figure it all out together here today there are a couple screws that are removed already and as I said that's because it's an engineering sample so this won't be fully representative but it'll be pretty close four screws here going into the Coldplay area retaining probably that whole heat sink to the PCB I see also you can tell from the markings here there's going to be a couple screws underneath where the screws coming up and through the PCB and into the back plate probably so we'll find that on the edges here we've got a couple that actually that one's unscrewed already I've got a couple that are going through the PCB and into a retention plate the radiator these designs are always interesting to me because they can they work really well or they can work really not well and you don't know until you test it um but with 4090s there's just so much heat flux uh and power to deal with becoming more beneficial I don't think this screw is supposed to be this chewed up but that's the back plate back plates free no cables so there's a back plate design it looks like some some area for air to come throughout the back over here but otherwise pretty simple design because this isn't a final retail sample and we would have to um look at a retail one to make commentary on things like thermal pads and their presence for the back you can see inductor line here mosfet line there's another one over here so they've got a vrm on both sides of the GPU it's actually really beneficial for a higher power larger core designs for the bigger silicon because as you're as the voltage regulator is handling the power delivery to the GPU core splitting across two halves of the PCB allows higher efficiency reaching the different parts of the core that it needs to reach and then memory memory vrm we'll look at once we get to the other side let's pull these four screws nothing particularly interesting On The Backs pretty standard it's a couple a couple controllers but this is so far going quickly I think we're probably going to take these out next actually the i o plate is pretty interesting on its own there's a ton of punched out holes on it which is good that allows air to get through and otherwise it's a 3D P1 HDMI I'm glad we have video evidence that there's already screws missing so that I can't be blamed for it later and they are using this is actually also noteworthy Acer is using the full three slot bracket uh for some reason this is not common for three slot video cards a lot of them end up running just a two slot bracket for the the larger card so these actually Nvidia made a really big point about this in their own Fe design where Nvidia uh was attributing in a lot of the structural rigidity to go in for full three slot to help prevent some of the SAG on the card along with their x-frame I think does it separate now I'll try yeah I might do the fan cables yeah oh yeah yeah just pulling the fan cables a lot going on on this PCB so for table and first of all I got three cables running to the board that I can see anyway and one of these is going to be for pump at least and the other two are probably for for fans LEDs things like that uh board layout so we've got 12 volt high power up here a couple shunt resistors up there as well two milliohm shunt resistors as a 5 milliamp shunt resistor down here if you wanted then there's another five milliamp up here so um options remain if you wanted to short those to increase the power Target which might make sense on this given that it's liquid cooled assuming the cooling works well 490 fat die and that is attached directly to actually let's just get this cable out of here securely always pull at the housing okay okay all right so here's the cooler points of interest colblate has a protruding copper block brick that comes out to contact the GPU core you see this sometimes and the old ebj clcs this was actually the EVGA hybrid clcs this was actually really beneficial for them the reason it worked great for evgas is because they were able to flatten the contact patch much better than on the acetec uh like concentric rain plate that they used to use because with gpus there's a little bit of a curvature to it but this is this is significantly flatter than say an IHS or something on a CPU so sometimes these protrusions I don't know if this is why Acer did it or not but it can be beneficial for improving the the contact the flatness and the pressure distribution you see the some Torx screws here that are attaching the cold plate to it looks like where the the micro fins yeah so opposite side this cold plate there's gonna be micro fins inside of the um the block I guess there's no pump in there it's not a pump block and then is it I'm assuming this side with the uh pumps yeah so dual pump over here and it looks like you can actually see them so this uh plastic protrusion here and then there's another one here that's probably where the pumps are located so for radiator Dimensions just got this from the team here so it ends up being a 227 mil wide so you've almost got like a 240. thickness is 22 mil and that keeps it within the three slot sizing they've got some shroud components here that are just plastic embellishments there's couple screws that look like they this may be more of an engineering sample artifact here but contact connecting these plates to the rest of the radiator um I'm guessing this has liquid in it right this this has a liquid in it yeah okay so so I won't take that off then yeah yeah yeah I'll leave it yeah I'll leave that on so uh so this is actually a I guess a functioning unit it's got liquid in it we're not going to take this out and look at the micro pens the microphones are pretty standard though more evidence of engineering samples so this is kind of a cool story in terms of seeing what goes on to design a product because they've got Stacks throttle pads on thermal pads which in an end product you would ideally never do this you would just get a custom made Pad but the thicker pads when you're at like four Miller are not uh not normally off the shelf or easy to get so stack pads there but otherwise memory is all sharing the GPU cold plates the memories effectively cooled by liquid as well the vrm is sinking into these contact plates which I don't know how well we can show this I'll try and show this camera so at the bottom from our perspective of the contact patch for the mosfets there's actually a fin stack and that's true for the one over here as well so there's some extra surface area they've hidden down in here to leverage more of the space and then it does eventually connect to the liquid coolant to the radiator um so I mean I think that really more or less shows it there's not much Point taking the rest of this off although there is only one screw holed in the den so we might as well normally I would just stop there but let's just take the one screw out it may be held in by a cable nope okay cool that's pretty cool okay I was gonna make a call that's really easy to disassemble but I don't there would be a there would be more screws in the final so here's where the uh block ends up living there's the pumps this could be used as a fill Port uh uh if they can manufacturing that's used if it's if it's left with that cap screw and then as a user you could refill it as well inside of the housing here so there's some um actually not foam so this is the the bracket for the fans there's a pla a PCB up here which I'm assuming is for an LED and uh then the the fan wiring which um because the engineering sample uh I won't I won't comment on the uh the wiring right now but I think that's pretty much it so that's the Acer 4090 this is not being sold Standalone right now but Acer's plan is to try and move towards more Standalone video cards so you see that with The Arc stuff sale with the AMD one we showed you for a future project uh Nvidia is a little picky here about who gets to put nvidia's name on things so I don't know if they've gotten through that process yet but either way if you're interested in this type of stuff basically Post in the comments because uh that's the only way it gets out of out of this box and onto just a retail listing so anyway we'll try and test it Standalone once it's done regardless thanks for watching check out the other video on the channel go to store.gamesaccess.net or patreon.com Gamers Nexus stops out directly and we'll see you all next time\n"