Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC Review: Taming the Beast

 The Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC is our fourth RTX 4090 card review. You can check out the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC, and MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X for details on the other three cards, though performance results will be included in our charts. As the top performer in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and one of the best graphics cards, plenty of people are looking at Nvidia’s halo RTX 4090 GPU and the various card models that use it, so let’s see how Gigabyte’s model stacks up.

Gigabyte’s Gaming OC represents one of the more traditional designs we’ve seen so far, and it’s ultimately no better or worse than the competition. A 1–2% difference in performance here or there falls within the margin of error on our benchmarks, which means the main draws of this card will be the looks, retail availability, and pricing. The core design appears to be identical to Gigabyte’s RTX 4090 Windforce, with the key difference being the RGB lighting rings around the fans — the 15 MHz factory overclock barely warrants a mention.

Let’s also address the gigantic melting 16-pin elephant in the corner. There’s still no official word on what’s causing the problems, but with over 20 melted connectors in just the past month — including a few that didn’t use the adapter cable and opted instead for a direct PSU connection — we can’t help but feel concerned. That goes for all 4090 cards at present, which means if you have one, you should exercise caution and regularly check temperatures, or perhaps just don’t actively use it right now. We really need a statement of findings from Nvidia at this stage, and until we get that it’s going to be a pain point for all RTX 40-series cards that use the 16-pin connector, including the upcoming RTX 4080.

On paper, the only real difference between the various RTX 4090 cards is their rated boost clocks and the resulting performance. In practice, the boost clocks are conservative, and we’ve found in testing that the four 4090s we’ve tested all run at 2.7–2.8 GHz while gaming. Best-case, then, we’re looking at around a 4% difference in performance, and in practice it’s usually less than 2%. That means you should focus on other factors, like aesthetics, any included extras, card size, and especially price — assuming you can find more than one of these cards in stock.

Gigabyte sets the boost clock for the Gaming OC at 2,535 MHz, a 0.6% overclock compared to the reference card. At stock settings, we saw average GPU clocks of 2,715–2,757 MHz across our test suite. That’s on the slightly slower end of the spectrum compared with the other 4090 GPUs we’ve tested, but only by around 20 MHz on average — not something you’d notice in the real world.

For more information on the core RTX 4090 functionality, check out our Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture piece where we go into more detail about the various changes Nvidia has made relative to the previous generation Ampere architecture. There are also additional tests that we performed with the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, including professional content creation workloads and DLSS 3 testing. Our AIB card reviews focus more on the card design and aesthetics, as well as any other extras, as those tend to be more important than minor variations in performance.

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