Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC Review Leave a comment
Our fourth RTX 4090 card review is for the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC. For information on the other three cards, see the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC, and MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X; nonetheless, performance data will be shown in our charts. Many people are looking at Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090 GPU and the numerous card versions that use it as they are the top performance in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and one of the best graphics cards. Let’s see how Gigabyte’s variant compares.
The Gaming OC from Gigabyte is one of the most conventional designs we’ve seen so far, and overall it’s on par with the competition. According to our testing, a 1-2% difference in performance here and there is within the margin of error, therefore this card’s key selling points will be its appearance, retail availability, and cost. The main difference between this graphics card and Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Windforce appears to be the RGB lighting rings that surround the fans; the factory overclock of 15 MHz is hardly noticeable.
Let’s also talk about that enormous melting 16-pin elephant over there. Over 20 melted connectors in only the last month, some of which did not use the adapter cable and instead chose a direct PSU connection, leave us uneasy. There is still no official information on what is causing the issues. That applies to all 4090 cards at the moment, so if you have one, use caution and check the temperature frequently, or maybe just don’t use it for now. At this point, we truly need a statement of findings from Nvidia, and until we do, any RTX 40-series cards that use the 16-pin connector, including the future RTX 4080, will experience issues.
On paper, the performance and rated boost clocks of the various RTX 4090 cards are the only meaningful differences between them. The boost clocks are conservative in practise, and our testing has shown that all four of the 4090s run at 2.7-2.8 GHz while playing games. In the best-case scenario, we’re looking at a performance differential of about 4%, while in fact it’s typically less than 2%. Assuming you can find more than one of these cards in stock, you should concentrate on other aspects such as aesthetics, any added extras, card size, and notably price.
The Gaming OC’s boost clock is set by Gigabyte at 2,535 MHz, which is 0.6% faster than the reference card. In all of our test cases, we observed standard GPU speeds of 2,715-2,757 MHz. That is on the slower end of the spectrum when compared to the other 4090 GPUs we examined, but only by an average of about 20 MHz, which is not noticeable in everyday use.
Image Credit: IGN