The Nvidia RTX 4090 launched last October with a suggested starting price of $1,599. Since that time, we still haven't seen any cards readily available without paying a substantial premium — most models listed at retailers start at over two grand. It's one of the best graphics cards around and unequivocally the fastest by any meaningful metric if you look at our GPU benchmarks, but paying over 25% extra on an already incredibly expensive GPU is a tough pill to swallow.
There's good news, however, in that Newegg has the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC in stock, for just $1,709. Okay, "just," but beggars can't be choosers. We've reviewed the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC, and found it to be a capable take on the GPU. It's pretty much a reference card made by a third party AIB, and don't pay any attention to the "Gaming OC" part of the name. The factory overclock consists of an extra 15 MHz over the reference boost clock, which at 2520 MHz means you get a potential 0.6% increase in theoretical performance!
But if you're in the market for an RTX 4090, the prospect of spending 20% more just to get an additional 2% from a slightly higher factory overclock is a bad trade. In fact, with manual overclocking, the Gigabyte card trades blows with other models, and you're basically subject to the silicon lottery as much as anything — plus whether or not the manufacturer used faster memory chips.
