Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

So the first thing you’ll notice with the RTX 4090 Gaming OC is that it has the essence of what we’d expect with a few small tweaks on the design, now with larger fans, when compared to the previous generation, and what feels like a slightly more plasticy feeling to it. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s a pre-production model, but the 3090 Ti Gaming OC that I have here just feels a bit better in terms of the plastic used.

Beyond that though, the key thing, like all 4090 models, is that the Gigabyte card is a beast in terms of size. I mean, it’s a chunky boy coming in at 340mm long, 165mm high and 75mm thick so the cooler protrudes beyond the triple slot design while the IO is actually only a dual slot. The other key noticeable thing is that it weighs a lot at 2285 grams but with any heavy product, it makes it feel more solid. I just wish there was maybe some metal on the shroud, but I guess that’s what allows Gigabyte to potentially upsell customers to a Master or Extreme-based card, so I still feel like you get a decent value for money prospect with the card even though it is now coming in at $1699, which is $100 over what the Founders Edition comes in at.

Now, I mentioned that the fans are larger coming in at around 110mm, and do include a different rotation on the middle fan compared to the two end ones to provide the very best cooling capability. There is a lot more RGB on the 4090 than I would have expected, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, around the fans, as it can always be turned off, but what’s interesting is that it can be quite distracting by default and ramps up based on the fan speed, which is nice, but isn’t exactly subtle, but again, having the ability to change it or turn it off within the Gigabyte RGB Fusion software, kind of negates this.

Around the back, we find a full-length backplate, with a large cutout for heat to dissipate from the extremely large finned heatsink. It all feels very solid, but I’m not entirely sold on the colour scheme. It’s not the first time Gigabyte has used this colour which is kind of blue/green, but with the front of the card being black, it just feels a bit mismatched. Other than that, there’s some large Gigabyte and GEFORCE RTX branding, which isn’t too over the top or in your face.

The only other branding on the whole card is on the top with another GEFORCE RTX branded wording and the Gigabyte RGB logo, which again, can be controlled through software, but I don’t mind this, as it’s pretty typical of what we’ve come to expect from Gigabyte Gaming OC cards over the years.

Also on the top is where we’ll find our 16-pin power connector with those 4 sense pins, and yes Gigabyte does include a 4 x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cable, which won’t melt, and if you have any fears on that, I suggest you watch our video with JonnyGURU that goes through it in a lot more detail. It’s also worth noting that due to the power limit of 450 watts on this card, you can run the adapter just using three of the four connectors, with no issue, and the fourth is more for cards that surpass the spec set out by NVIDIA.

Next to this is a OC/Silent BIOS switch to flip between the two BIOS modes depending on your use case and for all of our testing, we of course used the OC mode to maximise performance as we’d expect any keen gamer to do so.

The end of the card sees both the front and the backplate merge into each other, which again, just looks a bit off due to the colouring to me, but does show us mounting holes for a support rail. On the opposite end, with the IO, as mentioned, it will take up two physical slots in your case, though the card protrudes much closer to 4 slots due to the large cooler. On the IO, we have some ventilation along with 3 DisplayPort 1.4a ports, and a single HDMI 2.1a port, which is the same as what we saw on the Ampere-based cards.