Introduction

ASUS Republic of Gamers Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum is designed to be the best graphics card you can buy. The GeForce RTX 4090 is already the fastest gaming graphics card in the market, but the ROG Matrix sets out to dial its out-of-the-box performance to levels that you’d normally expect from a new NVIDIA SKU such as the RTX 4090 Ti, if it ever came out. Who is this card for? It’s for PC enthusiasts that want the best hardware, no matter the price. To overclockers, the card offers a binned RTX 4090 GPU, sitting on a top-notch PCB, with a strong VRM and advanced monitoring features. The power limit is also pretty high at 600 W, so they could take the card apart and get it under extreme cooling, to seek out top ranks in benchmarking and overclocking leaderboards.

ASUS reserves the ROG Matrix brand for only the fastest GPU each generation, and with the GeForce RTX 4090 having emerged as the leader, the company set out to design the fastest custom design there is. It begins with picking the highest quality 5 nm AD102 silicon that can provide the best possible boost clock residency and the best overclocking headroom. This is combined with the top bins of GDDR6X memory chips. Likewise, the VRM solution uses the highest current DrMOS that can run coolest at a given switching voltage, pair it with the most power limit we’ve seen on an RTX 4090, up to 600 W, to max out the specification of the 12VHPWR connector. Then on, it’s over to ASUS’s in-house overclockers to give the ROG Matrix the highest factory overclock for a production RTX 4090 to run out of the box. These are just one half of the puzzle, the other being cooling.

Keeping the ROG Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum cool is a factory-fitted, closed-loop liquid cooling solution. Its most striking aspect is that this is the first production graphics card to come with liquid metal TIM pre-applied from the factory. Liquid metal TIM offers the most effective thermal conductivity, but since it is a viscous (runny) fluid that’s also electrically conductive, its application and transport are extremely difficult. Thankfully, ASUS has mastered an in-house technique of applying Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal TIM, which it originally developed for its ROG Strix Scar series gaming notebooks—a testament to just how stable and portable the TIM application is. The liquid cooler features a full-coverage copper water block, and a large 360 mm radiator, which ASUS says is more than capable to tame the RTX 4090 for the kind of factory overclock and tweaking headroom the card offers.

As for the GeForce RTX 4090 itself, it remains the fastest gaming GPU for this generation. Based on the latest GeForce Ada graphics architecture, the RTX 4090 is designed for maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD and beyond, including ray tracing. NVIDIA already has the 4K segment covered with the RTX 4080, so the top-spec SKU is for not just gaming, but also some serious creator work, taking advantage of the 24 GB video memory on offer, and NVIDIA GeForce Studio drivers.

The GeForce Ada graphics architecture debuts the 3rd generation of NVIDIA RTX real time ray tracing technology, faster and more capable CUDA cores that operate at higher frequencies; 3rd generation RT cores with even more hardware-accelerated capabilities, and 4th generation Tensor cores with support for even more math formats. The Optical Flow Accelerator component enables DLSS 3, a feature that generates entire alternate frames entirely using AI, without involving much of the graphics rendering machinery.

The RTX 4090 nearly maxes out the 5 nm AD102 silicon it is based on, enabling 128 out of 144 streaming multiprocessors present on the GPU, which works out to 16,384 CUDA cores, 128 RT cores, 512 Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs. The memory sub-system of the RTX 4090 is nearly carried over from the RTX 3090 Ti, you get 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across the chip’s full 384-bit memory interface, working out to 1008 GB/s of memory bandwidth. With Ada, NVIDIA has placed greater architectural emphasis on significantly larger on-die caches. The RTX 4090 gets 72 MB of it.

The ASUS ROG Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum comes with the highest factory overclocked speeds of all RTX 4090 cards available; 2670 MHz boost, which is a 6% increase over the 2520 MHz reference speeds. While the RTX 4090 Founders Edition (de facto reference design) comes with a power limit of 450 W, ASUS has raised this to 500 W, which can be sent all the way up to 600 W via software. The memory speed is surprisingly left untouched at 21 Gbps. As we stated earlier, this is a halo product based on top of a halo product, something for a very small niche of enthusiasts; and so ASUS is pricing it at a whopping $3,200, an actual doubling of the $1,600 MSRP for the RTX 4090.