Behold, friends-with-big-wallets: the biggest, heaviest, most expensive, most power-consuming, and *drumroll* best-performing card ever made!
Let us take a closer look.
The Good Stuff
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- Only one card has been released, the RTX 4090
- Incredible performance, beating the next best thing by at least 50%
- Easily hitting 120+ FPS on 4K in most games with max details
- Card temperatures are (very surprisingly) good!
- Noise levels are decent
Wow, sounds terrific! What could the downsides possibly be… ?
The Meh Stuff
It’s all good news and bad news for this card, with very little truly neutral news. The 4090 is probably going to be a divisive component among builders.
The Bad Stuff
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- The reason the card runs cool and quiet is because it has a gigantic cooler
- The price is $1600
- Three slots (or four with custom cards), 2kg (4.5lbs), and so big it might not fit in normal mid-tower cases
- The price is $1600
- It can draw 450W of power, or up to 600W if you let it
- The price is $1600
And that is the launch in a nutshell: An extremely powerful and surprisingly thermally stable card… but also an extremely large, power-hungry, and pricey card!
Going Forward
We will be recommending the RTX 4090 in both the Extremist and Monstrous tiers of our main chart. A few other GPU/CPU changes have been implemented as well.
All changes are summarized as follows:
GPU changes:
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- Added RX 6500 XT to Fair (as an option)
- Added RX 6750 XT, RTX 3070 to Superb
- Added RX 6800, RTX 3070 Ti to Excellent
- Added RX 6800 XT, RTX 3080 to Outstanding
- Added RX 6900 XT, RTX 3080 Ti to Exceptional
- Added RX 6950 XT, RTX 3090 to Enthusiast
- Added RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 4090 to Extremist
- Added RTX 4090 to Monstrous
CPU changes:
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- Removed Threadripper 3960X from Monstrous
All of these changes have already gone live on the USA chart, and will roll out to other countries as the 4090 becomes available globally.
If you are Team Red, new competing cards are just a few weeks away.
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