The last time Asus offered up a graphics card in its ultra-premium ROG Matrix line, it was an air-cooled RTX 2080 Ti, priced at around $1,900 (if you could find one in stock back in early 2019). For those of you who didn't get one of those cards (and maybe have been saving up ever since) the company is back with its ROG Matrix RTX 4090, a super-premium liquid-cooled model of the already super-premium RTX 4090. Yes, this card is going to cost a lot (although we haven't been told exactly how much yet).
Announcing today here at Computex in Taipei, the ROG Matrix RTX 4090 sports a 360mm radiator with Asus' magnetic daisy-chain fans and a copper cold plate that makes thermal contact with the GPU via liquid metal. The result, according to Asus, is an RTX 4090 with the highest GPU boost clock on the market. But what exactly that boost clock number will be wasn't yet available when we wrote this.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
The card isn't all about speed, either. It also sports a stunning 2.5-slot design, with the PCB housed in an inner chamber, lit by some tasteful RGBs, and a metal ring running around the end of the card, providing support for the cooling tubes, which stick directly out of the end of the card.
Asus says that it needed to do a fair amount of work to use liquid metal here, and it's the first card the company has sold using liquid metal as a thermal compound. Because liquid metal is a conductive liquid and, unlike laptops, users orient their GPUs in various ways inside their cases, they had to design a barrier around the GPU itself, to keep the material where it belongs, providing top-notch thermal transfer.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
As noted, the coolant tubes stick right out of the end of the card, which will limit case options. But then again if you're installing it in something big enough to house a 360mm radiator, there's a good chance you also have the recommended 18.8 inches of clearance for the card and its tubes.
Asus says the overclocked power limit for the card will be 600 watts (550W default), which the company says is about the maximum power you can dump into the card and still achieve performance gains. Anything more than 600 and you're just adding heat for no clock speed improvements.
We'll update this story once we know pricing and availability. But given the previous ROG Matrix card was close to $2,000 without liquid cooling or liquid metal, we'd expect that ROG Matrix RTX 4090 to be one of the best graphics cards, and one of the most expensive, you can buy – well, that someone can buy anyway. I have a feeling most of us will have to opt for something a little more affordable – which will likely be just about any other card on the planet.
After a rough start with the Mattel Aquarius as a child, Matt built his first PC in the late 1990s and ventured into mild PC modding in the early 2000s. He’s spent the last 15 years covering emerging technology for Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Consumer Reports, while testing components and PCs for Computer Shopper, PCMag and Digital Trends.
No doubt, ASUS must be using the best highly binned AD102 GPU chips for this card, enabling it to run at the fastest clock speeds of all GPUs currently available.
BTW, they just released and updated a new product page for this card. How much will the card cost ? 3K USD min ? A luxury product more like. But the company mentions this to be a limited-edition card, so I don't think many SKUs will hit the retail shelves.
As expected, for the fans, ASUS is using the new ROG MF-12S ARGB series which come with a magnetic connector that can easily be daisy chained together. The Ryujin III coolers also use the same fan. There are also tons of sensors placed on the chokes, VRMs, & power delivery circuits, all in addition to the sensors on the GPU die.
But I really like this particular addition though:
According to ASUS, there is a new feature within the "GPU Tweak III" app that will let you know if the Gen5 12VHPWR connector is correctly seated and plugged into the graphics card. Pretty nice, safe, and handy, no ? More info can be found on the product's page.
Very, very, nice indeed! Yes it will be expensive, and it’s supposed to be! But like all technology it will be surpassed by the RTX 5090 in a couple of years. Best card on the market.
The company is also using a special multi-layer resin that protects the SMD components on the PCB against being shorted by the liquid-metal. So now it should cost 3.5K USD min, hehe.
Hard to see in the Tom's photos (but visible in others with direct lighting, and in Asus' renders) but lurking inside is a regular waterblock. Making this a block in a box in a box - they could have at least tried to shave the volume down a bit! Even if we assume the outer 'box' cannot be shrunk due to PCB side, there is enough room to drop this from a 3-slot to 2-slot card by eliminating only empty space.
