I've discovered that all 4090s clock stretch below 1.15v. The factory limit was changed mid-production to 1.07v and thus new 4090s are secretly losing up to 100mhz.

Hi everyone, I do a bunch of overclocking research and reverse engineer NVIDIA's stuff for funsies. You may have head of my recent nvflash bypass that allows flashing any BIOS called nvflashk.

While toying around with my fresh 4090 STRIX, I realized that the effective clocks in HWInfo were linearly changing with the commands from my EVC2. I had always passed off that HWInfo sensor as some silly estimate, but HWInfo shouldn't be aware of what voltage my EVC2 is sending to the VRM controller.

The true voltage is not seen anywhere in the OS and the driver is not aware of it either as all the voltage-related things in the driver/BIOS (such as downbinning without a +100 in Afterburner) do not respond to my changes. Additionally, the effective clock speed changes resulting from the hacked voltage tracked very closely with the changes to my benchmark scores/framerates, despite my target clock remaining 3300mhz in EVGA Precision.

All this combined means that the effective clock sensor in HWInfo must be accurate, so I began mapping it out in relation to voltage, and found even more surprising things.

Here's the spreadsheet to my findings on exactly how much NVIDIA is clock stretching our 4090s. The results are surprising - up to 50% at 700mV, but also 2.5% at 1070mV. That means newly produced 4090s are silently losing up to 100mhz, despite being advertised as running just as good as any other, because they aren't allowed to go beyond 1070mV.

That means the revision wasn't just a simple voltage reduction - NVIDIA flat out reduced the performance of the 4090 mid-production.

I also made a video on this documenting this phenomenon further, but the mods won't allow posting my own vids, so you'll have to find it on your own (or they let me post it).