Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC Review – But Will It Fit

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Hows it going everybody welcome to we do tech. and my look at the Gigabyte Gaming RTX 4090 OC. Nvidia’s new crazy beast that will devour your wallet and power supply.

Alright let’s quickly go over the specs and then get into the pricing because that might make you think twice.

On paper the 4090 is around 50% – 100% more powerful compared to the 3090Ti. It still has 24GB of GDDR6X memory and a 384Bit memory interface, but that’s kinda where it ends.

Everything else is pumped up quite a bit with double the Tensor and RT cores, even the clock speeds at around 50%.

Pricing, the Gigabyte Gaming RTX 4090 OC is retailing for $1700 on Newegg which is $100 more than the Windforce and $100 less than the Aorus Master. Here in South Africa, it’s around R46000. It’s expensive but if we just look back to 2021, the 3090ti was $2000 at launch and this again has quite the spec bump compared to it.

However, with GPU mining somewhat dead now and all the secondhand GPUs on the market, is it actually worth paying that much? Or is it just better to get a secondhand 3090 or 3090ti. That’s defiantly the $1600 question.

Compared to the RTX 30 cards the new Gaming OC design looks so much better. Even though the previous cards weren’t “ugly” it didn’t have much character really. With the new 4090 Gaming OC it gets a bit of that back. It’s nothing crazy but with the size of this thing, it just makes it look a little more aggressive. Like a labrador vs a Beagle, it’s bigger with a bit more menacing growl. But it’s still a Labrador. Not sure if it’s the best way to describe a graphics card but whatever, I’m going with it.

Speaking of the size, just like I said in my unboxing video, this thing is crazy big. It makes normal GPUs like my 3080 Vision look small. Like a 2 fan card compared to a normal 90mm 3 fan card. But now there are 3x 110mm fans. 

Plus it’s not a 4 slot card, so say goodbye to trying and fit this thing in a mini ITX case. The GPU measures L=340 W=150.2 H=75.2 mm. I was worried that it wouldn’t fit in my Corsair 4000D Airflow. But with the AIO at the top there were no issues.

Included in the box is an anti-sag bracket which can be useful.

Now taking a look at the back for the IO you get 

3x Display Ports v1.4a

1x HDMI 2.1 ports, Which can now finally support 8K@60FPS and 4K@120FPS on a single cable just like display Port 1.4.

Power 

Next up is power draw and here it gets a bit much. Firstly, there is the new 16pin PCIe gen 5 connector that sits in the middle of the card which would be fine. But because of the included 16pin to quad 8pin adaptor. Yes you are going to need 4x 8 pin normal PCIe power cables. The adaptor is extremely stiff and from what I heard you don’t want to bend these adaptors too much otherwise they could get damaged and over heat. Because of that getting a clean look will be hard, depending on your case. The 4000D does not have cable openings directly under the GPU so it needs to bend to the front side of the case which doesn’t really work. Now to be fair that’s with this case and with future power supply directly supporting the new 16pin it will only need a single cable which would look much better.

For power draw I say a max of 424W and that’s with any power limit adjustment. In games it ranged more between 330w to 400w and on idle draw around 20w. So you can imagine a 500w power supply definitely isn’t going to cut it here. Even my 750w was not able to handle both the 4090 and the 13900K so you will need something closer or above 1000w. Luckily Cooler Master sent over their M2000, a 2000w platinum power supply that I think will last me at least till next year when with the rate we are currently going for hardware.

Because of that crazy power draw cooling will need to be just as crazy. And again by just looking at the size of the card you can already see that. As for the fans again they are larger than most and like the previous cards the 2 outer fans rotate counterclockwise, while the center fan rotates clockwise, this is to reduce turbulence. The fans also has a fan stop mode, meaning if the card is under low load.

For cooling, it did a decent job reaching a peak of 68c under full load. With the fans running at 76% 

As for how the 4090 performed, well paired up with the super toasty i9 13900K, no game stands a chance even in 4K.

Clockspeeds

With all of the games set to either high or ultra in 1080p every game was easily over 100fps even with ray tracing on CyberPunk. Siege even reached over 700 frames. So I guess it’s time to upgrade that 360hz monitor of yours already.

On 1440p it was the same thing here, except now ray traced Cyberpunk with no DLSS fell below the 100fps mark. But everything else was still way up there.

Then for 4K, it was only Cyberpunk on ultra without DLSS that fell below 100fps all the reset with pretty much max settings on 4k did over 100 FPS. And by enabling DLSS you get an extra 50%-100% bump in FPS. All though I did get some mixed performance on some of the games with DLSS and FSR where it sometimes even did worse than stock. Or like Cyberpunk only getting a measly 10% boost.