Introduction

Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 Vulcan OC-V represents the company’s top air-cooled custom-design RTX 4090 “Ada” graphics card, which we’re thrilled to review for you today, besides more than half a dozen other custom-design cards. It isn’t a Colorful product without having over-the-top styling, some of the heaviest cooling solutions with the most elaborate designs; and a loaded accessories package; and the same holds true for the RTX 4090 Vulcan OC-V. Colorful has looked after everything a gamer and PC enthusiast could possibly want, and turned it into a checklist when designing this card.

The GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada” represents this generation’s flagship graphics card from NVIDIA, and is the company’s latest attempt at creating a GPU that’s as generationally fast and capable as if Moore’s Law were supporting its development (it isn’t). You are promised nearly 50% performance gains over the previous-gen RTX 3090, and nearly 100% if you consider the RTX 3080 as last-generation’s flagship, which NVIDIA did.

The “Ada Lovelace” architecture heralds the third generation NVIDIA RTX, the company’s path-breaking real time ray tracing technology that combines conventional raster 3D graphics with real time ray traced elements such as lighting, shadows, reflections, illumination, and motion-blur. Over the generations, NVIDIA has innovated fixed-function ray tracing hardware for pretty much each kind of RT workload, and the same holds true for “Ada.” In addition to these, NVIDIA innovated the Optical Flow Accelerator, a hardware component that enables the GPU to create unique frames out of thin air, using AI, without involving the bulk of the raster graphics machinery.

NVIDIA carved the RTX 4090 out of the 4 nm AD102 silicon by enabling 16,384 out of 18.432 CUDA cores physically present, besides 128 3rd generation RT cores, 512 4th generation Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The memory subystem looks identical to the RTX 3090 Ti, with 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit memory bus; but NVIDIA has significantly enlarged the on-die cache memory with “Ada.”

The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC-V comes with not just the company’s most premium VRM design and level of PCB engineering, but also some really cool features, including a color LCD screen that puts out real-time graphics card monitoring (or anything you want it to); dual-BIOS, RGB headers, besides some goodies in the box. The card comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 2.62 GHz, compared to 2.52 GHz reference. Colorful is pricing the card at $1,770, a $170 (+10%) premium over the NVIDIA baseline price.