Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition
Classy performance. $2,959 | www.nvidia.com
Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards can no longer be considered generic variants. If you take a glance at the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, it really looks every bit a premium piece of engineering. In fact, I’d go as far as saying there’s almost a bit of an Apple vibe to it. Its metallic shroud includes a subtle backlit GeForce logo. It looks fantastic.
FE cards have grown in recent generations. The RTX 4090 is a genuine triple slot card. It incorporates two fans, one of which blows air outside the case, while another blows it through the card. The cooler is excellent. Six heatpipes and a vapour chamber dissipate heat from the hot running AD102 GPU, while the heatsink is packed with thermal padding for the memory and VRM. When looping Metro Exodus, we saw a peak temperature of 74C. That’s great, though the Asus came in even lower at just 61C. It’s rather stunning that for all the talk of runaway power consumption and temperatures, the coolers are hardly stressed!
It comes with the 12VHPWR 16-pin power connector. Nvidia includes a 4x 8-pin adapter, though you can get away with connecting only three of them, which still gives you 450W. It’s still in
an awkward side mounted location that doesn’t lend itself to clean cable management. It comes with three DP 1.4a ports and a single HDMI 2.1 port. Nvidia must be privately ruing the lack of DP 2.1 ports, especially given that users buying very high refresh rate 4K or upcoming 8K screens with DP 2.1 will include large numbers of 4090 buyers.
The 4090 FE includes a highly customised and compact PCB. It still manages to include a 20-phase VRM, 24GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory and the 608mm² GPU into its compact area. The small PCB allows Nvidia to dedicate nearly half of the total area of the card solely to the second fan and heatsink.
That’s useful information, but what we all want to know is how does this beast perform? In one word, it’s incredible. Every other graphics card looks sluggish in comparison. We’ve begun to incorporate a lot more ray traced titles in our benchmarks going forward, and in those cases, the RTX 4090 is twice as fast as the RTX 3080 Ti. In more traditional rasterised titles, the 4090 is the fastest card ever, and by a big margin. The RTX 4090 represents the largest intergenerational performance uplift of any graphics card. And don’t forget the importance of DLSS. If you’ve got it, use it for even higher performance, though if you’re running 1440p, you might not even need to! We didn’t even include 1080p testing as that simply doesn’t make sense for such a card.
The RTX 4090 Founders Edition destroys the myth that reference cards are basic or entry level. But the 4090 is definitely not for everyone. GPUs at close to AU$3,000 can never be universally praised, though if you’ve got a system and monitor that’s deserving of such a card, you’ll be rewarded with stunning levels of performance. We can live with the 450W TDP when performance per watt has taken such a big leap forward.
Apart from the steep price, the RTX 4090 excels in all areas. Will AMD be able to compete with better bang for your buck? Stay tuned for that.
The classy Nvidia RTX 4090 FE elevates ‘reference card’ expectations to a new level. Chris Szewczyk
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