ASUS GeForce RTX 3090 STRIX OC Review - Introduction

Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 OC review

It's time to evaluate that fresh flagship from ASUS; yes, meet the muscular GeForce RTX 3090 STRIX OC edition graphics card. It comes factory tweaked, has a beefy designed cooler, and 24 GB of the fastest GDDR6X memory your money can get you. Well, that, and a staggering 10469 Shader cores. With their aim to perform at low acoustics combined with a beautiful design card. And let me already spill the beans; this card is once again Quiet and achieved some fantastic scores.  

Now let's stick to what we have on deck; we review and benchmark the new premium flagship graphics card. All hail the might and awe that is the GeForce RTX 3090. Armed with a shader core count that will make at least one your eyebrows frown with a nearly nauseating 24 GB of blazingly fast GDDR6X graphics memory. The GeForce RTX 3080 already is a smoking hot product, but of course, but NVIDIA is NVIDIA and decided to stretch their legs a little more. One thing that needs to be stated, though, the product like shown today is all about Ultra HD and higher resolutions. It is an RTX Titan replacement or successor, I should say. I write all this before testing the product, but already understand that it will be hard to show where this product will make real sense. The good news is, for me at least, a product doesn't have to make sense to be appreciable. I mean you like Ferrari as well, eh? (albeit right now that probably is not the best example). Well, Tesla maybe .. a model S is out of range for many, but man, they drive nice, accelerate fast, and you get that feeling you're driving something from Star Trek. That said, in that realm, we think the RTX 3090 will position itself in its own niche.

It was 2017 when Ampere as a GPU architecture surfaced on the web, and, up-to earlier this year, NVIDIA had not listed this name in any of its roadmaps on the consumer side. It was with military-level secrecy that the Ampere consumer part was developed. Ampere, of course, is the base unit of electric current in the international system of units. But the GPU is named after André-Marie Ampère, a French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electrodynamics. NVIDIA has a track record of naming their GPU architectures after mathematicians and physicists or figures from closely related fields, to name a few; Pascal, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and, more recently, Turing. While it was no secret that the new GPUs would be based on Ampere, we've seen much discussion about fabrication nodes, architecture, and specifications. Still, everybody seems to have forgotten that Ampere already launched earlier this year for the HPC market. The first product based on Ampere was the NVIDIA Tesla A100, outfitted with a GA100 Ampere GPU based on 7nm fabricated at TSMC; that product holds 54 billion transistors has 6912 Shader cores. On September 1st of the year, 2020 NVIDIA announced three initial Ampere graphics cards in its first launch wave. A week before announcements, specifications of the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 took a twist; the shader core count mysteriously doubled up from what everybody expected. The GPUs are fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process further develops Samsung's 10nm process; no EUV is applied in production just yet. The first wave of announcements would see the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 being released first, and, as a bit of a surprise, the GeForce RTX 3070 would be arriving in roughly the same timeframe as well. The initial launch of Ampere for consumers entails the GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6, RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X, and what we test today, the 24GB GDDR6X based premium flagship, the mighty mo, the GeForce RTX 3090. The lineup nearly doubles Raytracing performance with Gen2 ray-tracing cores and 3rd iteration Tensor cores. These cards will all be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a. Most importantly, it is that outrageous shader processor count (referred to as CUDA cores by NVIDIA), passing the 10K marker, nobody .. not even us saw that one coming.

The NVIDIA GA102 GPU is used initially for two products, the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards. And it is one big GPU die and product overall alright, the 3090's GA102-300-A1 GPU is armed with 10.496 Shader processors and 28 billion transistors. And no, that's not even the fully unlocked product. FYI: the GeForce RTX 3080 is listed as having 8.704 Shader cores, and the GeForce RTX 3070 (GA104) will bring 5.888 Shader cores to the table. In this review, we'll check out the mother of them all, the GeForce RTX 3090, paired with 24GB of GDDR6X graphics memory, 24 GB, and 10K+ Shader cores.

Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 OC 24G

The Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 OC is tailored with that NVIDIA GA102 GPU, this time the revision 300 GPU SKU; it has an almost incomprehensible 10.469 Shader cores activated and is paired with a tremendous 24GB of all new GDDR6X graphics memory running at 19.5 Gbps, values that have been unprecedented until now. Muscled up, this card is equipped with a dual-bios design with performance and silent mode; the three fans start to spin and cool once the GPU warms up. You'll notice one thing immediately; it has 3x 8 (6+2) pins, so you'd better have an agreeable power supply (all three connectors must be used). The card is rated to allow an eye-popping and law- and jawbreaking 480 Watt power draw, that's 350W for the reference design. This indicates it will perform a notch better, alright. Weighing in at 1565g will this $1800 heavy-weight champion deliver? Yeah, let's start up this review, shall we?