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RTX 4090 Third Party Cards and Overclocking
In our initial review, all of the testing was confined to just the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. Now that a few days have passed, we have additional test results from some of the third party cards. We'll be updating this page with more cards over time, so if you want to see how all the RTX 4090 cards we've tested stack up, this is the place to come.
We tested the third party cards using the public 522.25 Nvidia launch drivers. For several games (where we saw larger changes in performance), we retested the Founders Edition as well. Thus the 4090 FE results on this page may be slightly different than on the earlier pages.
We're limiting our testing of third party cards to just 1440p ultra and 4K ultra, for what should hopefully be obvious reasons — but if you need us to restate the obvious, it's because 1080p performance is severely GPU limited in non-DXR/RT games. It also saves time if we eliminate half of the tests we have to run.
Overclocking results are also included, at 4K only. We tested the RTX 4090 Founders Edition with a +200 MHz core clock and +1200 MHz on the GDDR6X memory (23.4 Gbps effective speed), with the power limit maxed out at 133%. Other cards managed similar results, give or take, though the Asus ROG Strix OC was able to reach +1750 MHz on its memory (24.5 Gbps effective), which suggested it had "down-labeled" 24Gbps Micron chips.
For third party cards, we're only running OC testing at 4K with ray tracing enabled, which will show the largest potential gains. As always with manual overclocking, the silicon lottery is in effect. We've only tested on sample of each card, so our results are not guaranteed. Other cards of the same model may hit higher or lower "stable" results.
Even at 4K ultra settings, the differences between the various cards are extremely limited. At present, the Asus ROG Strix OC ranks as the fastest 4090 we've tested, barely, beating the MSI Suprim Liquid X by about 1% and the Founders Edition by 2% in our DXR test suite. In the standard rasterization test suite, the difference shrinks to just 1%, give or take.
You should make your purchasing decision primarily on price, aesthetics, and other factors beyond raw performance. The Asus card for example had better thermal characteristics as well, and the GDDR6X memory only reached 64C even when overclocked. The Founders Edition meanwhile hit 78C on its memory, while the MSI card was "worst" at 82C.
Those are interesting results, as with the previous generation cards the GDDR6X temperatures tended to be far, far higher. Nvidia says Micron has deployed a new process node for its latest 16Gb GDDR6X modules, with lower power requirements, and these results bear that out.
As for overclocking, the Asus card takes first place again, beating the Founders Edition by 2%. The MSI card actually had the worst overclocking results, as its memory only managed +800 MHz (22.6 Gbps effective), so it was 1% slower than the Founders Edition. Compared to the reference card running stock clocks, a manual overclock on the Asus card improved overall performance by 9–13 percent in the individual games, and 10% on average.
The 1440p testing results echo what we showed above at 4K, so there's not much more to add. Even in ray tracing games, the gaps in performance between the various cards are very limited.
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