Introduction

GIGABYTE today introduced its GeForce RTX 3090 Eagle OC graphics card alongside NVIDIA’s debut of the monstrous RTX 3090 “Ampere” GPU. The card combines NVIDIA’s de facto flagship product based on Ampere, the RTX 3090, with a mammoth 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, factory-overclocked speeds, and a board design more for gamers who want to load their battlestations with the most powerful graphics option in the market. GIGABYTE introduced the Eagle brand of custom-design graphics cards covering the value-end of its product stack, which runs from here through to the WindForce OC series and eventually onto the coveted AORUS Gaming series geared toward enthusiasts and overclockers. That said, the Eagle shares many underpinnings with the WindForce OC series.

NVIDIA has restructured the top end of its product stack with the RTX 30-series. The $700 GeForce RTX 3080 launched last week is being referred to as a “flagship product,” and it’s shown beating not just its logical predecessor, the RTX 2080, but also the previous-generation flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, while being a fair bit cheaper. The RTX 3090, on the other hand, is being labeled a “halo” product, a title previously held by the $2,500 TITAN RTX. With the RTX 3080 already offering 4K UHD gaming with RTX-on, the RTX 3090 transcends product-segments between gaming and professional visualization, with NVIDIA extensively talking to us about its benefits to creators, especially when combined with GeForce Studio drivers. The TITAN RTX itself was such an inter-stack product. So from this perspective, the RTX 3090 is exactly 50% pricier than the RTX 2080 Ti at launch, but also $1,000 less than the TITAN RTX.

As part of the product stack restructuring, NVIDIA leveraged a common “GA102” silicon for the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, with the RTX 3080 heavily cut down from it, while the RTX 3090 nearly maxes it out. Last time around, the RTX 2080 and its refresh, the RTX 2080 Super, were based on the second-largest TU104 chip, while the RTX 2080 Ti is based on the larger TU102. Between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, NVIDIA carved itself large amounts of room for future segmentation.

NVIDIA created the GeForce RTX 3090 out of the “GA102” Ampere silicon by enabling all but one of its TPCs, nearly maxing it out with a staggering 10,496 CUDA cores, 328 tensor cores, 82 RT cores, 328 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. NVIDIA maxed out the chip’s 384-bit wide memory interface to cram in 24 GB of it. Ampere represents the 2nd generation of NVIDIA’s path-breaking RTX architecture that introduces real-time raytracing to the consumer segment by combining conventional raster 3D graphics with real-time raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient-occlusion, and global illumination. The 2nd generation even introduces raytraced motion-blur and has fixed-function hardware just to pull this otherwise difficult effect off. Find more details about the architecture in our NVIDIA Ampere Architecture article.

Unlike TITAN-branded graphics cards, the RTX 3090 is open for NVIDIA’s partners to come up with custom designs. GIGABYTE paired the RTX 3090 with a meaty dual fin-stack heatsink that uses six copper heat pipes, a copper base-plate, and three fans. Keeping up with the hot new design trend of this generation, the cooler is longer than the PCB, which means much of the airflow from one of the fans goes straight through the card and out of the backplate, mimicking the Dual-Axial Flow Through cooling solution of the NVIDIA Founders Edition cards. The Eagle OC comes with factory-overclocked GPU Boost speeds of 1725 MHz, while the memory is left untouched at 19.5 Gbps (GDDR6X effective). GIGABYTE is pricing the card at the $1499 MSRP.