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With our fifth RTX 4090 review, today our attention turns to the beast that is the Gigabyte Gaming OC model. Offering a huge, quad-slot cooler, dual-BIOS, and a power limit that can hit up to 600W when overclocking, there's certainly a lot to like about this card on paper. We put the Gaming OC through its paces and see how it stacks up against the competition.
While our previous RTX 4090 review assessed the liquid-cooled MSI Suprim Liquid X, today we take a look at a huge air-cooled card in the form of the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC. Despite its gargantuan size, the Gaming OC only offers a 15MHz factory overclock versus the reference spec, so it will be interesting to take a closer look at clock speed behaviour in this review.
Alongside the choice of either the OC or Silent BIOS, Gigabyte also offers gamers a smattering of RGB lighting, a metal backplate and a vapour chamber cooler, so without further ado, let's get into the nitty gritty…
| RTX 4090 | RTX 3090 Ti | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 Ti | RTX 3080 | |
| Process | TSMC 4N | Samsung 8N | Samsung 8N | Samsung 8N | Samsung 8N |
| SMs | 128 | 84 | 82 | 80 | 68 |
| CUDA Cores | 16384 | 10752 | 10496 | 10240 | 8704 |
| Tensor Cores | 512 | 336 | 328 | 320 | 272 |
| RT Cores | 128 | 84 | 82 | 80 | 68 |
| Texture Units | 512 | 336 | 328 | 320 | 272 |
| ROPs | 176 | 112 | 112 | 112 | 96 |
| GPU Boost Clock | 2520 MHz | 1860 MHz | 1695 MHz | 1665 MHz | 1710 MHz |
| Memory Data Rate | 21 Gbps | 21 Gbps | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps |
| L2 Cache | 73729 KB | 6144 KB | 6144 KB | 6144 KB | 5120 KB |
| Total Video Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 24GB GDDR6X | 24GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit | 320-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1008 GB/Sec | 1008 GB/Sec | 936 GB/Sec | 912 GB/Sec | 760 GB/Sec |
| TGP | 450W | 450W | 350W | 350W | 320W |
First, for a quick spec recap. Using TSMC's 4nm node has allowed Nvidia to vastly increase transistor count, up from 28.3 billion with GA102, to a staggering 76.3 billion with the largest Ada GPU, AD102. Accordingly, core count has gone through the roof, with the RTX 4090 home to 16384 CUDA cores, with 512 Tensor cores and 128 RT cores, with a sizeable increase to the ROP count too, up to 176.
Such a leap forward in process node has also allowed Nvidia to crank the clock speed significantly, with the RTX 4090 now sporting a 2520MHz rated boost clock. The Gigabyte Gaming OC we are reviewing today has tweaked that further, adding an extra 15MHz out of the box.
Memory configuration is almost identical to the RTX 3090 Ti, with 24GB GDDR6X running at 21Gbps, operating over a 384-bit interface, totalling memory bandwidth of just over 1TB/s. That said, there has been a substantial upgrade to the L2 cache with the Ada architecture, with the RTX 4090 now offering 73MB, compared to 6MB for GA102.
Power draw also remains at 450W, as per the RTX 3090 Ti, though the Gaming OC can reach up to 600W when overclocking.
