Introduction

Zotac GeForce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO in today’s review is the company’s top air-cooled custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA’s latest GeForce “Ada Lovelace” flagship. It introduces the new AIRO design scheme with its streamlined, airy cooler shroud; and a focus on effective ventilation of the large aluminium fin-stack array. The RTX 4090 Ada represents NVIDIA’s finest in GPU engineering to date, and heralds the third generation of RTX real time ray tracing technology that the company pioneered. RTX along with DLSS formed the company’s effort to keep the generational growth in gaming visual realism as Moore’s Law begins to buckle.

Built on the 4 nm EUV node, the GeForce RTX 4090 AD102 silicon crams in over 76 billion transistors, a 3x increase over the previous-generation. It gets as many as 16,384 next-generation CUDA cores running at speeds nearing 3 GHz, while keeping the same 24 GB GDDR6X memory setup from the RTX 3090 Ti. The Ada graphics architecture introduces 3rd generation RT cores that can accelerate even more of the real-time ray tracing pipeline with the addition of two key hardware components; and 4th generation Tensor cores that can leverage 8-bit and 4-bit math formats for an up to 5x uplift in AI deep-learning neural net building and training. The new Optical Flow Accelerator hardware enables DLSS 3, a revolutionary update to the popular performance enhancement, where the RTX 4090 can generate entire frames of a game purely using AI, and without involving the main graphics rendering hardware of the GPU, thereby nearly doubling frame-rates.

The GeForce RTX 4090 Ada is carved out of the 4 nm “AD102” silicon by enabling 16,384 out of 18.432 CUDA cores physically present. It also gets 512 out of 576 Tensor cores, and 128 out of 144 RT cores. The 384-bit GDDR6X memory bus is maxed out, with 24 GB of memory that ticks at 21 Gbps, working out to 1008 GB/s bandwidth. NVIDIA has significantly increased the on-die caches over the previous-generation, giving the RTX 4090 some 72 MB of cache, which should have a similar impact on the memory sub-system as Infinity Cache does on AMD RDNA2 GPUs. All this comes at the cost of power, with the RTX 4090 having a baseline typical power value of 450 W. NVIDIA has standardized the 12+4 pin 12VHPWR connector, that’s capable of delivering 600 W of continuous power.

The Zotac RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO features a flamboyant, colorful and illuminated board design, without compromising on the airflow of its massive 4-slot cooler. The card features Zotac’s highest factory OC for this GPU right now, with a boost frequency of 2.58 GHz, compared to 2.52 GHz NVIDIA reference. The memory is untouched at 21 Gbps. Gamers should love the neatly-executed RGB zones of the card. There are other enthusiast-friendly features such as dual-BIOS, and an addressable-RGB header that lets you connect your rig’s RGB setup to the card, using Zotac Firestorm software to control it. Zotac is pricing the AMP Extreme AIRO at $1700, a reasonable $100 (6.25%) premium over the NVIDIA baseline.