Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC Review: Truly Massive

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 launched last week, setting a new bar height for the competition to clear. With the RTX 4090 sitting atop the GPU benchmarks hierarchy and ranking as the fastest of the best graphics cards, there remains the question of which particular 4090 model you should buy. Besides the Founders Edition, we have cards from numerous third-party add-in board (AIB) partners on the way. We're kicking off our third party reviews with the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC, an absolutely huge card that dwarfs the already chunky 4090 Founders Edition. The simple answer for which card you should buy would be "whatever RTX 4090 you can find in stock." Despite the extreme pricing, the performance uplift was significant enough that all of the 4090 cards almost immediately sold out at launch. Certainly some of that can be attributed to RTX 4090 scalpers, but without cryptocurrency GPU mining — no, the RTX 4090 is not profitable for mining, nor are any other GPUs right now — we can only hope that scalper pricing will quickly fade away. That will naturally depend on Nvidia getting sufficient supply of RTX 4090 GPUs to the market. While we know the cards sold out, we don't know how many were actually sold. It could be thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands. But halo GPU launches typically don't come with massive supplies. Still, the RTX 4090 is incredibly fast and Nvidia likely isn't in a hurry to push out other 40-series models — not when Nvidia by its own admission says it expects to be in an oversupply situation at least through the end of the year. Nvidia can't delay forever, however, not with AMD announcing RDNA 3 on November 3. We fully expect AMD to offer some card — perhaps a Radeon RX 7900 XT — at a much lower price than the RTX 4090. Maybe there will even be multiple high-end cards using the Navi 31, like RX 7950 XT, RX 7900 XT, and RX 7800 XT. We'll find out more in the next couple of weeks. We've now tested three different RTX 4090 cards: the Founders Edition, this Asus ROG Strix, and (review upcoming) the MSI Suprim Liquid X. We'll have results for all three cards in this review, though knowledgeable gamers will know that performance rarely differs much between cards using the same core GPU — aesthetics and other factors become more important. Here are the specs for the three different

Graphics Card

Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC

MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X

RTX 4090 Founders Edition

Architecture

AD102

AD102

AD102

SMs

128

128

128

GPU Shaders

16384

16384

16384

Boost Clock (MHz)

2610 (Gaming), 2640 (OC mode)

2625

2520

VRAM Speed (Gbps)

21

21

21

VRAM (GB)

24

24

24

TFLOPS FP32 (Boost)

85.5

86

82.6

TFLOPS FP16 (FP8)

684 (1368)

688 (1376)

661 (1321)

Bandwidth (GBps)

1008

1008

1008

TDP (watts)

450

480

450

Launch Date

October 2022

October 2022

October 2022

Launch Price

$1,999

$1,749

$1,599

We've removed most of the redundant rows from the specs list above, as all three cards have the same base hardware. The only real differences in terms of specs come from the boost clock and any potential difference in power rating. Asus doesn't specify a TBP, though we suspect it's the same 450W as the Founders Edition. If you install Asus GPU Tweak, you can also select an OC mode that applies an additional 30 MHz to the GPU core clock and boosts the power limit by a few percent. We skipped that and instead will investigate manual overclocking. On paper, the Asus card has a 3.6% factory overclock while the MSI card has a 4.2% factory overclock. In practice, the GPU clocks we measured during testing are far closer than that. The Founders Edition averaged 2738 MHz in our Metro Exodus test, the MSI card got 2783 MHz (1.6% higher), and the Asus card got 2791 MHz (1.9% higher). As usual, Nvidia's real-world GPU clocks tend to easily outstrip the spec sheet. If you want more information on what makes the RTX 4090 tick, check out our Nvidia Ada Lovelace Architectural deep dive. We also ran quite a few additional tests on the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, including professional content creation workloads and DLSS 3 testing. For our AIB card reviews, given the relatively limited differences we see in performance, we'll focus more on the card design and aesthetics as well as any other extras.

The above Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix unboxing video will give you a good overview of what you get with the card. It's huge, weighing in at just over 2.5kg (5.5 pounds) and measures 358 x 149 x 70mm — quite a bit longer, taller, thicker, and heavier than Nvidia's RTX 4090 Founders Edition that measures 304 x 137 x 61mm and weighs 2186g. Compared to the previous generation RTX 3090 ROG Strix, things have changed substantially. The 4090 card is quite boxy, without the chopped off corners. There's also not as much RGB lighting, or at least it's different from the previous 30-series Strix cards. There's a rectangle plastic cover at the end of the card (opposite the video ports), along with an RGB "Republic of Gamers" logo, and that's it.

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The new ROG Strix chassis definitely embraces the "go large" mentality of graphics cards. It's a 3.5-slot width, effectively occupying four slots in practice. Oddly, Asus sticks with a dual-slot IO bracket. We're not sure why, since covering an extra slot would help support the card a bit more and potentially provide more exhaust ports. Not that the card will actually exhaust much air out the IO bracket, despite the cutouts. The heatsink fins are oriented parallel to the IO bracket, which means most of the airflow will go out the top and bottom of the card and back into your case. It's a traditional approach to cooling and should work fine, though we wouldn't suggest putting the ROG Strix into a smaller case — not like it would fit anyway.

Asus includes three 104mm axial fans on the card, all with integrated rims that help direct airflow into the heatsink fins and improve static pressure. That's a slightly larger fan size than on the previous generation 30-series Strix cards' 97mm fans, and the new fans are also slightly thicker (deeper). As we've seen with other recent Asus cards, the middle fan rotates clockwise while the outside fans rotate counter-clockwise, which Asus says reduces air turbulence and fan noise. Asus also includes dual HDMI 2.1 ports alongside the traditional triple DisplayPort outputs, though only four can be active at any time. As noted in the main 4090 review, the DP ports are still using the old 1.4a standard — yes, that's the same port standard that first appeared on the GTX 10-series back in 2016. Why not DisplayPort 2.0? It apparently wasn't ready in time, or at least that's what Nvidia claimed when asked during a briefing. That seems unlikely considering the RTX 30-series launched in 2020, and DP 2.0 was finalized in 2019. Meanwhile, VESA just announced the DisplayPort 2.1 spec, which AMD's RDNA 3 is rumored to support — no real surprise as it's fully backward compatible with DP 2.0.

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[Asus-RTX-4090-Disassembled gallery, 11 images]

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Dismantling the 4090 ROG Strix is a reasonably straightforward process. There are ten Phillips head screws securing the metal backplate, which also adheres to the VRMs underneath. Once that's out of the way, there are four more screws that secure the heatsink to the GPU, and these are designed to be installed using a torque screwdriver to avoid overtightening. You'll also need to remove eight more screws on the IO bracket. Once all of those screws are removed, a small amount of force should be sufficient to detach the GPU and PCB from the heatsink and cooling shroud. However, there are three cables — two for the fans, one for the RGB lighting — connected near the edge of the PCB, so make sure to disconnect those before fully pulling the PCB away. One of the main reasons we wanted to disassemble the Asus ROG Strix card was to check the GDDR6X memory. It's labeled "D8BZC," which if you look at Micron's full GDDR6X part catalog corresponds to 21Gbps modules. That's all well and good, except the behavior of these chips leads us to believe that Micron is labeling some 24Gbps (D8BZF) chips as 21Gbps.

We mention the memory in particular as our manual overclocking results were quite impressive, especially on the memory. The 4090 Founders Edition started to have stability issues and artifacting with a +1200 MHz memory overclock (23.4 Gbps effective). The MSI card showed artifacts at just +1000 MHz (23 Gbps effective). But this specific Asus ROG Strix card? We were able to push the memory slider in MSI Afterburner up to the maximum +2000 MHz (25 Gbps effective) and still didn't see any artifacts. It wasn't fully stable at that setting, as FurMark crashed after a few minutes, but +1750 MHz (24.5 Gbps) ran the FurMark stress test for over 30 minutes without issue. And it wasn't just a matter of appearing stable while also running extremely hot, as HWiNFO64 reported maximum GDDR6X junction temperature of only 64C — just 4C hotter on the memory than at the stock 21Gbps setting.

As for the GPU, we managed a relatively stable +200 MHz in initial testing but eventually had to drop that to +180 MHz as we experienced a bit of instability. Without more voltage (likely via a hardware voltage mod), we couldn't quite get the card to a stable 3.0 GHz, but we did easily break 2.9 GHz. The Asus ROG Strix let us increase the power limit to 120%. The MSI card limited us to just 110% while the Founders Edition allowed 133%. Given the MSI card supposedly starts at a 480W limit instead of 450W, that potentially gives the Founders Edition the highest power limit of basically 600W (598.5W), the MSI card tops out at 528W, and the Asus card seems to allow up to 540W. It's also possible the Asus card actually has a 480W base limit, which would mean a final limit of 576W. Note also that we pushed up the fan speed curve quite a bit for this overclock, just to be safe. We set the base fan speed at 50% up to 30C, then a straight ramp in RPMs up to 100% at 70C. We ended up with fan speeds of around 80% during testing, which was not at all quiet, though we likely could have dropped those a bit with further tuning efforts.

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TOM'S HARDWARE 2022 GPU TEST PC

Intel Core i9-12900K MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4 Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16 Crucial P5 Plus 2TB Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold Corsair H150i Elite Capellix Cooler Master HAF500 Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022, and we'll continue to use the same hardware for a while longer. AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X or the upcoming Core i9-13900K might be a bit faster, but we're using XMP for a modest boost to performance and the GPU generally becomes the limiting factor at 4K — which is really what you should be running if you're thinking of buying an RTX 4090. Our CPU sits in an MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, with DDR4-3600 memory — a nod to sensibility rather than outright maximum performance. We also upgraded to Windows 11 and are now running the latest 22H2 version (with VBS and HVCI disabled) to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. You can see the rest of the hardware in the boxout. Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We've already tested the RTX 4090 Founders Edition at 1080p, and found that it's generally overkill at such settings. For the AIB cards, we'll focus on the 4K and 1440p performance.

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We'll start with the performance that matters most: 4K at maxed out settings. If you're using a 1080p monitor — even one with an extreme refresh rate — the RTX 4090 will almost certainly be overkill. That's less true if you're playing games with lots of ray tracing effects, but we've covered that elsewhere.

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We have both stock and overclocked results for the ray traced games, while we limited overclocked testing in our standard test suite to the Founders Edition. That's because even at 4K, we start to see other factors limit performance. Across our standard test suite, the overclock on the Founders Edition only improves performance by 4% on average. In our ray tracing suite, the same settings yield an 8.5% improvement. The Asus 4090 ROG Strix card ends up as the fastest of the options we've tested, but not by much. At stock, it's 1.2% faster than the Founders Edition and a scant 0.6% faster than the MSI card in our standard test suite. The gap's slightly larger in the DXR suite: 2% faster than Nvidia's reference model and 0.9% faster than the MSI card. To put it bluntly, no one will actually notice less than a 2% gain in performance, and probably not even a 10% gain without running benchmarks. Speaking of which, the relatively large overclock on the Asus ROG Strix adds another 8.5% to its 4K DXR result, which makes it 10.7% faster than the stock Founders Edition card. But if we go with overclocked results on all the 4090 cards, we're back to a 2% improvement over the Founders Edition, and a 3.3% improvement over the MSI card — yes, the Nvidia model performed better than the MSI model with overclocking, though that could easily be luck of the draw. The individual results tell a similar story. Less demanding games like Metro Exodus Enhanced show smaller gains from overclocking, while Control shows the biggest improvement overall at 11.8% (compared to factory stock).

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We've only tested stock performance at 1440p, and the results are generally the same as at 4K. The Asus ROG Strix takes the top spot, offering about 1% higher performance than the Founders Edition and MSI cards. The gap is slightly larger with ray tracing, at least compared to the FE model, where Asus comes out 2% ahead. But we're largely splitting hairs and if you're after pure performance, any of the 4090 cards should more than suffice.

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We measure real-world power consumption using Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus (the original, not the enhanced version) and while running the FurMark stress test. Our test PC remains the same old Core i9-9900K as we've used previously, to keep results consistent. For the RTX 4090 cards, we've upped the quality setting to 4K extreme in order to tax the GPU as much as possible, and we run at 2560x1440 with FurMark. The following charts are intended to represent worst-case power consumption, temps, etc. and so we do check other settings to ensure we're pushing the GPUs as much as reasonably possible.

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At stock, the Asus card shows somewhat interesting behavior. It uses less power than the other 4090 cards in the Metro Exodus test, but more power in the FurMark test. It also used the most power of any graphics card we've tested after overclocking, reaching 569W — which would mean about 632W at the outlet, after accounting for power supply inefficiencies. The MSI card meanwhile used slightly more power in its overclocked configuration, despite a theoretically lower power limit. Moving on to the GPU core clocks, the reason for the high power draw in FurMark becomes immediately obvious. The Asus ROG Strix still averaged over 2.9 GHz in FurMark, compared to 2.98 GHz in Metro. The MSI card had lower clocks in both stock and overclocked configurations, at least in FurMark, but the Asus and MSI cards are basically tied for clock in Metro (we're not going to worry about an 8–12 MHz difference). Moving on, fan speeds are also tied to temperatures, so don't worry too much about the lower temps in overclocked mode — the fans were running much faster! At stock settings, though, the Asus Strix card ended up a bit cooler than the MSI card in Metro Exodus, and both surpassed the Founders Edition by nearly 10C. With FurMark, the Asus card still ended up cooler than the Founders Edition, but MSI had the best overall result — thanks no doubt to the heavier throttling that occurred under that workload. Fan speeds also favor the Asus ROG Strix, at least at stock when gaming. With Metro Exodus, the fans were only running at around 1100 RPM, give or take. FurMark bumped that up to nearly 1600 RPM, but it's not really a typical workload for most people. The aggressive fan speed curve with overclocking meanwhile nearly doubled the Asus card's RPMs. For noise levels, we use an SPL (sound pressure level) meter, with the microphone 10cm from the center of the middle fan. This helps to minimize noise pollution from other sources like the CPU cooler fans. With no load on the PC, the noise floor measured less than 32 dB(A), which is more or less the limit of our SPL meter. Running a game for 15 minutes or more resulted in fan speeds of 41% on the Asus card and a noise level of 41.5 dB(A). The Founders Edition was noticeably louder at 45.0 dB(A), while the MSI card was only a bit louder at 42.6 dB(A). We also set all three cards to a static fan speed of 75%, which resulted in 58.1 dB(A) on the Asus card, 57.2 dB(A) for the Founders Edition, and 53.3 dB(A) on the MSI card. Overclocked, with a fan speed of 89% on the Asus card, we measured 60.5 dB(A) — rather noisy, to be frank. The MSI card couldn't overclock as far, so it 'only' had its fans at 81% with a noise level of 55.0 dB(A).

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As far as custom cards go, the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix checks all the right boxes. You get a modest factory overclock and a more potent cooler compared to the baseline models. There's perhaps a bit more RGB lighting than the reference model, but the RGB is somewhat subdued compared to what we've seen on other cards in the past. Still, Asus knows how to build a potent card, and the ROG Strix models represent the top of the Asus range. Factory stock performance might not impress too much compared to the reference model, but the card we received did manage some impressive manual overclocking results. The thing is, we're not sure if we just got "lucky" with our sample, or if binning by Asus will mean similar results for all the ROG Strix OC models. The fact that we reached over 1Gbps higher clocks on the GDDR6X memory than on any previous GDDR6X-equipped card certainly indicates that our card has 24Gbps memory chips that are just labeled as 21Gbps. It's virtually guaranteed that not every ROG Strix OC card will have similar results, though some cards might do even better.

It mostly goes without saying that you're going to need a very spacious case for this card. There are bigger RTX 4090 cards out there (hello, Gigabyte 4090 Aorus Master), but not many will exceed the ROG Strix dimensions. It's a good thing SLI is basically a thing of the past, since few if any cases (and motherboards) would be able to accommodate two such cards. Pricing will still be the biggest roadblock. The RTX 4090 already carries an extreme $1,599 price tag, but Asus bumps that up $400 for the ROG Strix OC. That's why we dropped the overall score from 4.5 stars to 4 stars, if you're wondering — the street prices will need time to stabilize, but out of the gate the ROG Strix OC doesn't offer enough to justify the price increase. The overall performance is fine, but it's nearly identical to the 4090 Founders Edition. Of course, that assumes you can even find the Founders Edition in stock — that's not the case right now, though perhaps in the coming months the supply will improve, or the demand will decrease, or both. Asus' branding is also strong, however, and our experience over the past several generations suggests there will be plenty of people willing to pay the 25% price premium for an ROG Strix OC card. We've talked to employees at our local Micro Center, and when a new GPU comes out, the Asus cards always tend to sell out first, even when there are faster cards available from a higher tier for less money. We won't see a higher tier than the RTX 4090, though, at least not any time soon. There's nothing that comes close to its level of performance, and unless AMD can pull a rabbit out of its hat with the upcoming RX 7000-series and RDNA 3 GPU launch, we'll probably need to wait for an RTX 4090 Ti before we'll see anything substantially faster. Or wait a couple more years and let's see what Nvidia's RTX 5090 has to offer in 2024.

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