Introduction

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is the green team’s flagship card based on the Ada GPU architecture. The card was released in October 2022 and has established itself as “the best, at a price.” During our original launch day coverage I reviewed eight (!) GeForce RTX 4090 cards, today we’re checking out the ninth one. Last year I’ve tested the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X and the RTX 4090 Suprim X Liquid. In today’s review I’ll look at the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio, which is the company’s most affordable RTX 4090 card available.

Actually, based on the listings at Newegg, it’s the most affordable RTX 4090 card available overall, at $1700, which is why I asked MSI for a chance to run this card through our extensive tests to determine whether this RTX 4090 is able to compete with the more expensive offerings available, which go up $2600—almost $1000 more.

With this review we’re also introducing our brand-new GPU 2023.1 test suite, which uses a Core i9-13900K, paired with the EVGA Z790 DARK, 32 GB of fast DDR5 memory, Seasonic’s newest ATX 3.0 power supply and Windows 11. We also added several new games for both ray tracing and rasterization, and there’s now an expanded minimum FPS section showing the results for all games we’ve tested, plus two new summary charts for minimum FPS.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is NVIDIA’s top dog, built using the mammoth AD102 graphics processor, which comes with 76.3 billion transistors, 16,384 GPU cores, 24 GB GDDR6X over a 384-bit wide bus and support for all the newest technologies like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, improved tensor cores, faster ray tracing and shader-execution reordering.

MSI’s GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio that we test in this review is a custom-design implementation with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution. The VRM design is a powerful 18+4 configuration with the Monolithic MP2891 controller. At the same time the card is carefully designed to not break, yet offer the same fantastic experience that other, more expensive RTX 4090 cards deliver. In terms of factory overclocks you’re getting an increase of 75 MHz GPU frequency over the NVIDIA Founders Edition, or 3%. As mentioned before, while MSI is pricing their card competitively against other offerings, there’s still a $100 increase over the $1,600 NVIDIA RTX 4090 MSRP.