Review: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founder edition

Yes, use MSI afterburner to undervolt, you have three options IMO.

1. Overclock and undervolt to the lowest possible yet stable voltage, removes throttling, temp is better, but also gives you higher clock speeds and more fps
2. Just undervolt and keep the same clock speeds, removing throttling and temps will be even better.
3. Undervolt even more by reducing the clock speeds, check if you get a performance hit or not within games, reducing throttling, giving even better temps.

This will for sure give your lower power consumption.
If you use DLSS and set it to your resolution depending on the screen you are using, you will also reduce power consumption greatly.

So in other words, even if they state that the card will use at least 450W, in reality, you can make it use just 250W,
or something depending on the game, resolution, and fps you want, and if you use DLSS and also if you undervolt it together. The card is more than powerful to actually run most games at close to 120fps on 4K and definitely at 60fps at 4K, maximum settings.


So for instance, if you have a 4K 120hz TV or monitor with gsync/freesync, most games will run at 120fps with or without DLSS, but if you use DLSS and limit your fps close to 120fps to remove tearing, your card will use only 30-40% less power. And even less if you undervolt it. That is of course depending on the game, some games are badly optimized to run even at 60fps 4K, hence why I say "most" games.

RTX 4090 is powerful and can use a lot of power (450W+), but it does not mean you need to consume that much power at all times when gaming. Mostly because of DLSS, but also because you can undervolt it and get better temps, and stable clock speeds without hitting performance, at least not noticeably.


The biggest issue is the big price, can you justify it at all? Better to wait? IMO, yes it's better to wait for AMD and now maybe Intel as well. Even without DLSS features

 

Love the sarcasm!!!

Everybody waiting for the white (or red) knight AMD coming to rescue forget AMD is a corporation driven by profit like all corporations: Nvidia, Intel, MS, Google, etc
And the prices will not be that low (my opinion) because they spent a lot on the research to produce this technology and they need to get that money back - from you the buyer.

 

The Price on this card is very high but to put it in context a 4 day break at Centre Parcs in the UK can cost over £2000 for a lodge, all gone in 4 days and just a memory, where with this card you would have a few years of great 4k gaming. Just a thought.

 

Well, IF the 'RTX 4080' 12GB were an RTX 4070 in disguise, then the RTX 4070 you're waiting for would actually be an RTX 4060 in disguise.

 

they haven't gone on sale yet.

 

I'm sad to see PC-gaming spinning completely out of whack from a value perspective. This has always been an expensive hobby, there has always been a better value in gaming consoles, at least when they are somewhat new. This value lowers year-over-year as the price on the console does not decrease linear compared to whatever hardware they feature. But as an enthusiast, that has always been willing to put a whole bunch of money into my computer rig to stay ontop of thing. I love everything new in tech, and I really dislike fiddling with optimising my settings to achieve good performance. I've always spent top dollar on getting whatever graphics card that will provide me with Very High / Ultra settings at my display resolution while also giving me a stable 60 FPS. In later years my bar has moved from having a rig that gives me a stable 2560x1440@60FPS experience, into something that will provide me with a stable 3440x1440@120FPS experience, still obtaining Very High+ settings, and if there are some ray-tracing goodness available I prefer to be able to utilise them without my FPS plummetting.

Seems like this is growing more and more unlikely by the day. This RTX 4090 seems like my perfect graphics card. It's the very first card on the market where I can feel comfortable that I should be able to achieve 3440x1440@120FPS regardless of my in-game settings. But this price point is getting ridiculous.

I have never been about getting the most for my money. There is no such thing as being an enthusiast and getting great value for money. I've paid for the top-of-the-lines cards in the past, even though the performance per dollar drops a lot when moving into the most expensive cards. The whole reason has been that this is my primary hobby and I don't mind paying extra for getting that little bit of extra performance that ensures I'll hit my performance goals without having to optimise a lot of settings and sacrifice visual quality in the games I'm playing.

Normally If you were a XX80 Ti user, you would look at whatever is the new generation of XX80 Ti. It would normally be in somewhat the same ballpark in terms of price compared to your previous XX80 Ti model making it all about generational improvements. Will this new generation of XX80 Ti, the card within my price range, offer a decent enough improvement to warrant an upgrade? And I would mostly conclude with yes, yes it does. These models were basically "price brackets". And I feel it's been like this forever until the RTX 3000 series where we had a price hike and XX80 Ti became XX90 at a much higher cost. That felt somewhat okay to me, considering inflation and whatnot. But having yet another price hike this time around makes RTX 4000 feel extremely awkward to me. The performance gains are truly impressive, efficiency is looking very good even though the max power usage of the card is kinda ridiculous on its own. But most of the generational gains go down the drain when NVIDIA yet again gives it a massive increase in price.

I could get the RTX 3090 at launch for about 15'000 NOK, the RTX 4090 is costing 21'000 NOK. This comes off as extremely strange to me. It makes the improvements from one generation to the next feel almost irrelevant when NVIDIA is also pricing the card at levels one would expect an RTX 3095 to exist with almost similar performance levels. When looking at this card as an RTX 4090, the performance uplift is very impressive. But when the card is not keeping the XX90 pricing levels from the previous generation it doesn't feel that impressive anymore.

The generational leap in performance would be comparing the RTX 3090 to the RTX 4080 16GB as they are both existing within the same price bracket. And I suspect that outside of improvements to RT that won't be all that impressive. One thing is for certain if the future puts even high-end (XX80) levels of performance at 15'000 NOK price points my days as a PC enthusiast is for sure over.

 

Yet no store has it's own prices set individually.
I bet those prices will skyrocket in 3 hours' time.

 

It will launch later today in about 4 hours. I expect day 1 stock will be sold out for the most part, but after 1-2 weeks it will be easily available everywhere.

 

But you can't actually buy cards from nvidia's site in europe... at least you cant in denmark - they just refer you to their partner shops.

 

Seems like it's a few shops choosing to crap on the rules laid down by nvidia.

 

Maybe you could in netherlands, but that wasn't an option with any prior nvidia series in denmark either.

Btw proshop is a danish shop - they just got sub sites for various european countries. The cards they have in stock are at their warehouse in aarhus, denmark.

https://www.proshop.dk/Grafikkort/A...G-STRIX-OC-24GB-GDDR6X-RAM-Grafikkort/3106488

 

Well one thing is what you expect, and another thing is what ends up being the reality. Regardless, shall be interesting to see if der8auer is correct about undervolting not working very well then, or if he simply didn't do it correctly.

 

$1600. and 450watts.Comical.

That said, yes it's a monster and not just the card size. RT has seen a massive increase and that's welcome.

The problem with PC and console gaming is that you are being held back by previous gens and older cards, gpu's cpu's.

PC'S should already be pushing much better graphics then a Console. Now you might say they do already. yes at 200% zoom.

Slightly better shadows, RT rez, and higher rez and framerate depending on GPU is not pushing the boundaries.


Lastly if you are thinking of buying one, maybe wait until AMD shows their hand.