Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC has a lot to offer, including a decent factory overclock of 105 MHz along with a programmable LED display and a graphics card support stand. The question, as with all of the RTX 4090 cards, is whether it can justify its price premium over the reference 4090 Founders Edition.
For most people, assuming you could actually find the 4090 Founders Edition in stock for $1,599, that would be the most sensible choice. It's nearly as fast as any other 4090 card, offers decent overclocking headroom, and it has a large cooler and relatively quiet fans. The Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC bumps the theoretical price up by $170 based on what we could find, but all of the 4090 cards are currently out of stock or selling at more than $2,000.
Perhaps a bigger issue for Colorful is that its graphics cards simply aren't widely available in the U.S. or the American continents in general. If you're reading this wondering if the Colorful 4090 card is worth buying, we don't have any serious complaints other than the somewhat high noise levels. If the card has a reasonable price compared to other options, it's as fast or slightly faster than most other models in our testing.
Looking at the wider graphics card market, the RTX 4090 sits at the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and all indications are that the only potential competition for this generation will come from a future RTX 4090 Ti. Even then, you're probably going to need to wait a year and the overall performance improvement from a fully enabled AD102 chip will likely be 10% at most.
AMD's RDNA 3 based RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT deliver a somewhat comparable value proposition, as does the RTX 4080, but the cost savings scale almost in direct proportion to the performance loss. Looking at our 4K results and the current MSRPs, the RTX 4090 delivers 0.054 FPS/$, the RTX 4080 offers 0.053 FPS/$, AMD's RX 7900 XTX delivers 0.058 FPS/$, and the RX 7900 XT gets 0.055 FPS/$. And if you're wondering, the RTX 3090 Ti (at $1,099, which you can no longer find in stock) is 0.049 FPS/$ and the RX 6950 XT at $799 also gets 0.049 FPS/$.
How's that for a change? The fastest and most expensive cards aren't a substantially worse value than slower and less expensive cards — at least when we're only looking at the very top of the performance stack. It almost feels like we need a clip of Nvidia's CEO saying, "The more you buy, the more you save!" Sorry, not sorry.
Getting back to the Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC, if you like the extra LED display, that's probably the biggest draw. Other 4090 cards include a support bracket or stand or whatever, but none of them have a display mounted on the side of the card. Or, you know, just buy your own little external LED display and call it a day.
The Colorful RTX 4090 ends up delivering similar performance to all the other 4090 cards, and tries to add value with some extras that probably aren't necessary. If you can find one in stock at a price you're willing to pay, it's a good card and worthy of consideration. But for most gamers, the price is going to be far too high for quite some time.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
Unreal Engine supervisor at ModelFarm blasts 50% failure rate with Intel chips — company switching to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, praises single-threaded performance
Nvidia reportedly preparing a Blackwell-based Titan GPU — maybe that 4-slot prototype cooler will show up again
AMD introduces a free Frame Latency Meter tool to measure mouse response time — works with all GPUs, no high-speed camera or manual frame-counting needed
