Introduction

The new ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC represents the very best air-cooled custom-design implementation of the new NVIDIA flagship that ASUS has to offer, and we’re reviewing it today. The ROG Strix brand was originally designed as a notch below bleeding-edge brands like the ROG Matrix and ROG Ares; but over the years has become one of the top custom-design graphics card brands to look out for, spanning all market segments. With the RTX 40-series, ASUS is dialing things up a bit, with an extremely premium product design that looks as much a work of art as technology; and has given it the company’s highest factory-overclock for air-cooled graphics cards. In this review, we have the factory-overclocked “O24G” SKU of the RTX 4090 ROG Strix.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada” is team-green’s new-generation flagship product designed to achieve the “ends” of Moore’s Law, if not through its “means.” It promises a generational doubling in performance over what NVIDIA considered its previous flagship, the RTX 3080 (and not the RTX 3090/Ti); a nearly 50% improvement over the halo RTX 3090; while fitting into similar typical-power envelopes as the RTX 3090, at 450 W. In addition, Ada seeks to further reduce the frame-rate impact of enabling ray tracing, by improving its entire ray tracing hardware set; and introduces the new DLSS 3 feature with a breakthrough new AI-based complete frame-generation technique that creates unique new frames entirely using AI, without involving the bulk of the graphics rendering pipeline; thereby doubling the frame-rate.

The GeForce Ada graphics architecture heralds the 3rd generation of NVIDIA RTX real-time ray tracing technology, which blends conventional raster 3D graphics with real-time ray traced elements such as reflections, shadows, illumination, and motion-blur. With it, NVIDIA is debuting 3rd generation RT cores that come with two new hardware components accelerating ray tracing more accurately, unburdening the CUDA cores; and 4th generation Tensor cores, which leverage 8-bit and 4-bit math formats to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude over the previous-generation. The “Ada” CUDA cores feature shader-execution reordering capabilities, which improve shader-bound ray tracing workloads; and benefit from much higher clock-speeds.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is based on the new 4 nm “AD102” silicon, with a mammoth 76 billion transistors, crammed onto a die that’s actually smaller than its predecessor. NVIDIA carved the RTX 4090 out of this silicon by enabling 16,384 CUDA cores from 128 SM (out of 18,432 CUDA cores across 144 SM). The card gets the same 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit wide memory bus as the RTX 3090 Ti, which works out to the same 1008 GB/s bandwidth, but NVIDIA has significantly increased the on-die caches, now with an L2 cache of 72 MB (up from 6 MB on the RTX 3090).

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC features a very cyberpunk-looking cooling solution that’s the largest among the cards we have today. High-quality dual-tone metal elements elegantly fuse with addressable RGB LED diffusers, to create a slick-futuristic look. There are several generational innovations with the latest ROG STRIX, including the latest-generation Axial-Tech 0dB fans, a meaty multi fin-stack heatsink with a vapor-chamber plate; and plenty of gamer and enthusiast-relevant features that include additional case-fan headers, an ARGB header, and dual-BIOS. There’s a nifty factory-overclocked GPU Boost speed of 2.61 GHz, compared to 2.52 GHz reference. All this comes at a stiff price-premium, with ASUS asking $2,000 for this card, a $400 or 25% premium over the $1,600 NVIDIA baseline price for the RTX 4090.