Acer’s Liquid Cooled RTX 4090 – Tested!

For our temperature testing, we measure the peak memory temperature under load. A reading under load comes from running Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition for 30 minutes.

Older data is represented by the greyed-out bars on the above chart.

Memory thermals are very poor, sitting at the top of the chart by some distance. This was surprising to me at first but, coupled with the lacklustre GPU thermals, the number shown do indicate that the overall cooling setup is not quite adequate for a 450W RTX 4090. Upon disassembling the card we did note that the memory modules don't contact the main area of the copper base plate, and instead jut out a fair distance from the main body of the cooling plate. Acer is using relatively thick 3mm thermal pads too, which don't look like they make amazing contact with the modules – nor are any thermal pads used on the back of the PCB. We also have to remember this is just a dual-fan card, when most 4090s are triple-fan.

It's hard to say how much of a difference all these factors make individually, or whether the compact radiator just does not provide enough cooling power for the 4090, but the results are clear to see.

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