Happy New Year, dear reader! We are now in the third calendar year in a row with lousy availability of electronics, and we celebrate this by testing a new flagship video card that no one should buy in today’s market.
Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC is the first video card to be sharpened on our new test bench. At the time of writing, it is surprisingly enough in stock, but right enough for the neat sum of 28,000 kroner – 9,000 more than what it costs at launch.
This is a meaningless video card for gaming. It is only a few months since this version was out to 22,000 kroner, and then it was not too crazy compared to the launch price. But Nvidia has completely beaten the RTX 3090 for players with the RTX 3080 Ti. It can get from around 18,000 kroner now, and in practice gives the network the same benefit.
AMD’s top card RX 6900 XT is also in stock. It costs 10,000 less than the RTX 3090, where you get both high performance and plenty of video memory. At the same time, Nvidia is about to launch both the RTX 3090 Ti and an upgraded RTX 3080 with 12 GB of video memory.
We still take a look at the video card. This is going to be our solid trot in graphics analysis of games in the future, and then we just as easily write a proper test. But as usual, I miss the point, as the prices are at a completely different level than what the producers advertise with.
READ: Here is Gamer.no’s new test bench for video cards »
Specifications
The Nvidia RTX 3090 video card is equipped with 24 GB of GDDR6X video memory, 10496 CUDA cores and a boost clock speed of 1695 MHz. Gigabyte’s Gaming OC keel lifts the clock speed to 1755 MHz, but in practice the card clocks to well over 2000 MHz out of the box.
STYLISH: The back plate on the Gaming OC cards looks good.
Mikkjell Lønning
The cooler measures 32 centimeters in length and 13 centimeters in width, and, like the other Gigabyte cards we have tested, takes up a lot of space in the cabinet. It is still far from the biggest coolers among third-party cards.
The video card has two 8-pin PCIe connectors that require a power supply of 750 watts or more, along with two HDMI 2.1 ports and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports.
Yting
It’s no big surprise that an RTX 3090 card can handle most of what you get against it. We see from the front that it is not possible to achieve a frame rate of 60 in absolutely all games in 4K, and especially with beam tracking, but it will soon come to the next generation.
I’m not going to say that it is whole unnecessary in 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, because there are plenty of demanding games where the video card is the bottleneck, but you really do not need RTX 3090 unless you play in 4K and like to be able to turn everything to max at any time.
Nvidia initially marketed the RTX 3090 as an 8K video card, but it is not. Even if you manage to run some older, well-optimized games in 6K and 8K if you want, there is little point in newer games. In general, you can expect about half the frame rate of what you have in 4K.
There are also no games where RTX 3090 is more than 10 percent better than its little brother RTX 3080 Ti, and they generally perform almost identically. Therefore, there is strictly no point in buying this if you do not want to try your hand at 8K.
In the future, more games will probably require more video memory than the RTX 3080 Ti has, but it is by no means worth the extra 10,000 kroner.
Our test bench
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- Processor: Intel Core i9-12900k
- Keels: Asus ROG Ryujin II 360
- Main card: Asus ROG Z690 Hero
- Memory chips: Kingston Fury Beast 32 GB DDR5-5200 CL40
- Storage: Kingston Fury Renegade 2 TB M. 2 SSD x2
- Power supply: Asus ROG Thor 1200 watt
- Cabinet: Cooler Master Mastercase H500P Mesh ARGB
- Operating system: Windows 11 Pro
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When we compare the Gigabyte card with the RTX 3090 card with the first one we tested in October 2020, we see that there are quite small differences. Even with a handful of new drivers and “Resizable Bar” support, the performance is almost identical to the MSI card we tested then. The test of the MSI RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio was done on our previous test rig, but the results in 4K are very similar – and identical in 6K and 8K.
All the game tests can be found on the next page of the article.
Power consumption and temperature
Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC requires a proper power supply. At most, the card pulled 349 watts from the wall, which is exactly the same as the Founder’s Edition card is measured for. In fact, using this video card less current than the little brother RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC, but there are still very high numbers for a video card.
DOUBLE CONNECTOR: The two connectors with eight pins deliver around 350 watts.
Mikkjell Lønning
In the previous generations, there has been a lot of talk about cards becoming more and more power-hungry, but now it seems that the development is going in the opposite direction due to increased competition from AMD. Rumor has it that we will get even more power-hungry cards for the next generation again.
Energy-hungry video cards generate high temperatures. The video card reached a maximum temperature of 78 degrees during a long stress test, and had a “hot spot” temperature of 89 degrees. In play, the temperature is a few degrees below.
The temperatures are low enough that the video card is unlikely to clock down due to heat, but the fans have to fight a little more than I like. Under full load, they are mostly between 1650-1735 revolutions per minute. The noise level is minimal, but the video card occasionally makes a loud female sound at high frame rates. In Rainbow Six Siege, it’s on the verge of uncomfortable to right on.
Overclocking
Out of the box, the Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC runs at a clock speed of up to 2025 MHz. It is already far above what Nvidia and Gigabyte promise, and thanks to the latest generation of GPU Boost.
This is how it is for all video cards this generation. In theory, it is possible to extract a few percent higher frame rate beyond that, but unfortunately Gigabyte has again chosen to lock the possibility to increase the power consumption of the video card. Then there is little one can do to overclock further.
We hope Gigabyte removes this barrier on Gaming OC cards in the future.
Now I have upgraded to a new test bench with Windows 11, and it may have introduced some instability to our system. As it is now, I can not get any overclocking to run stably in more than a handful of games, while most games crash to the desktop. However, I do not notice this with other video cards I have lying around, so it seems that it is simply not possible to overclock this stably with more than 20-30 MHz. Then it’s just as easy not to.
Conclusion
There is absolutely no point in buying an RTX 3090 video card today. If you are sitting on an 8K television with HDMI 2.1, then it might be relevant, but now Nvidia has announced that they will launch a Ti version in January. Then there is even less point in.
For those who really feel the need for a powerful video card, the RTX 3080 Ti and AMD RX 6900 XT are the best choices you have today. They provide largely the same performance as the RTX 3090, and cost significantly less. It is difficult to recommend flipping up 10,000 extra for video memory one does not need.
TOO EXPENSIVE: All electronics are expensive today, but the RTX 3090 has become so expensive that it has almost become a kind of symbol of the semiconductor crisis.
Mikkjell Lønning
Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC is the most powerful video card you can buy. At least until the end of January. It is of course a feather in the cap for Nvidia that they manage to hold on to the lead against their fiercest competitor, but it loses some significance when the price level is as it is.
The Gigabyte cooler does the job as usual, delivering respectable temperatures with low noise levels. But the fact that they have again limited the possibility of proper overclocking is quite sour.
Nvidia is ringing in 2022 with promises of new video card flagships at shameless prices, and this will probably propagate into the next generation that we believe will come again in the autumn.
Hi Intel, maybe?
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