Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition
If you want the best of the best…
If you thought the RTX 4090 Founders Edition was big, check out the Asus ROG Strix. If you’re into bicep curls, the weighty Asus is here to help! Seriously though, the Asus is a big and heavy card. It features a futuristic look with RGB and a lot of the appealing little touches we’ve come to expect from high end Asus ROG products.
The Asus comes with a factory overclock, with an official rated boost clock of 2,610MHz, an increase of 90MHz over the FE. The memory clock remains unchanged. It also comes with an eye watering price, at $3,799, a good $800 more than the ‘basic’ 4090s.
Asus has gone all out with the 4090 Strix. It’s a quad slot card with an enormous vapour chamber cooler and seven heatpipes. The underneath of the heatsink is dotted with an array of thermal strips to keep the memory chips and VRM cool. There’s also a thick backplate. Load temperatures maxed at just over 60 degrees, that’s stunning for a 450W card, though at the same time, not entirely unexpected with this kind of cooling capability.
The PCB is simply extreme. This 24-phase design with 70a stages looks like it was built with the expectation of 600W TDPs or more. Should a 4090 Ti eventuate, or you wish to overclock your card, this design will happily accommodate it. Note that the PCB is still quite compact, in terms of length. This allows Asus to follow the recent trend of blowing air through part of the card.
Asus includes a 4x 8-pin adapter for use with the 16-pin 12VHPWR adapter, which can deliver up to 600W. Like other 4090s, make sure the connector is 100 percent inserted with as little bending as possible to avoid any potential issue.
Asus usually includes some extras over and above the FE card. In addition to the monster cooler and higher clocks, you get dual BIOS, with a switch to choose between default and low noise settings. There are a pair of 4-pin fan headers too, which is very useful for adjusting external fan speeds according to the GPU temperature.
The video output complement is excellent. Though it still misses out on DP 2.1, you get dual HDMI 2.1a and three DisplayPort 1.4a. You can use up to four ports at the same time.
The Asus outperformed the Founders Edition, but not by as much as you might expect. The advertised boost clocks generally mean little. In reality, if you have the power headroom and cooling overhead, the card will boost much higher than its rated clock. In our testing in an open testbench, the card was happy to hold clocks in the range of 2,750 to 2,800MHz, and with that you get a shocking amount of performance, though again, not a lot higher than that of entry level 4090s – ‘entry-level‘, being a relative term.
The Asus 4090 Strix is extreme in every way. It’s the card to buy if you’re after a genuine flagship that looks the part, while offering performance, cooling and low noise levels to match it. Top tier ROG products usually come with premium price tags, though if dropping $3,000 or more on a graphics card is acceptable to you, what’s a few hundred bucks between friends? If the FE is a V8 Ferrari, the Asus is the V12 version.
The Asus Strix improves over the FE in every way with typical ROG flourishes, though be prepared to pay a hefty premium.
Chris Szewczyk
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