The PNY RTX 4090 sports reference clocks with a custom cooling design that works well. Just mind the somewhat limited overclocking options, as maximum power consumption is locked down tight.

Pros

• +

  Great cooling and noise levels

• +

  Still the fastest GPU around

• +

  Good build quality

Cons

• –

  No real extras to speak of

• –

  Power limited to 102 percent max

• –

  Slightly slower than Founders Edition

PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB Review

The

GeForce RTX 4090

continues to reign as the fastest of the

best graphics cards

currently available, and even better: prices seem to finally be dropping below $2,000. Take the

PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 RGB

(opens in new tab), which you can pick up on Amazon — and there’s the

non-RGB variant for about $50 less

(opens in new tab). We’re still hundreds of dollars above Nvidia’s $1,599 starting MSRP, but we’re getting closer. Maybe by the time the 40-series refresh cards start to show up we’ll actually see acceptable prices (but don’t count on it).

A big part of the problem with the RTX 4090 is the exceptional performance. It’s up to 50% faster than the previous generation

RTX 3090 Ti

in gaming performance, without using DLSS 3. It’s also significantly faster in many professional workloads as well as AI tasks. And the next step down, the RTX 4080, is still expensive and noticeably slower, so those with deep pockets are simply opting for the top product.

Three months on, after the newness has faded a bit and things are starting to settle down, how does the RTX 4090 look? We’re looking at PNY’s reference clocked RTX 4090 XLR8 Gaming Verto Epic-X RGB to find out — and kudos for that adjective laden product name, which we’ll just truncate to “XLR8 RGB” for the rest of this review. 

It’s a bit strange to have a second reference clocked card, as most companies tend to send us overclocked models. Obviously, that means identical specs to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, and potentially lower performance than competing cards — but even heavily overclocked cards only add a few percent to framerates, often with higher power draw. So if you want reasonable power consumption and don’t care about the final 3–5 percent increase in performance, this could be just what you’re after.

More likely is that people will be interested in PNY’s card if they can find one in stock for close to MSRP. All other areas being roughly equal, saving a few hundred dollars is always appreciated, even for extreme performance graphics cards.

As for the competition, AMD basically stops at the RTX 4080 level with its new

RX 7900 XTX and XT

GPUs. There’s a relatively large gap between the 4090 and the next step down, whether you’re looking at Nvidia or AMD cards. Despite the lack of Titan branding and certain Titan features (like unlocked drivers in a few professional applications), we effectively have a Titan replacement — at least until the actual future

Titan RTX

arrives (assuming it ever ships). 

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom’s Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.