If you are a gamer and want the best, there is only one option. For an introduction and an overview of the architecture, see our review of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition (opens in a new tab). It is big, expensive, unconditionally powerful, and only in Founders Edition.

Asus has given this powerful AD102 GPU the ROG treatment, and while the RTX 4090 Founders Edition cannot be called a compact card, Asus has taken it to the next level: the Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition is a massive 357.6 x 149.3 x 70.1 mm card that will be hard to fit in many cases. It's also heavy, so if you like to do some heavy lifting and play PC games, Asus is your man; it takes up 3.5 slots, which actually means 4 slots.

The card features a futuristic look with lots of RGB and the attractive little touches you'd expect from a high-end Asus ROG product. It also comes with a factory overclock, with an official rated boost clock of 2,610 MHz, a 90 MHz improvement over FE. It can also be set to an even higher overclocking starting point of 2,640 MHz with Asus' GPU Tweak software. The memory clock remains unchanged at 21 Gbps.

Asus' price is eye-popping. At a whopping $1,999 / £2,169 / AU$3,799, it is a significant premium over the entry-level RTX 4090. The "entry level" and the RTX 4090 do not belong in the same sentence. But flagship products come with a premium, and if you're an enthusiast and can afford it, no one should judge you; Nvidia and Asus certainly do.

Asus has gone all out with the RTX 4090 Strix, occupying 3.5 slots, which as already mentioned, actually means 4 slots. There is ROG branding on the sides with RGB lights and more RGB on the edges of the card. This design is not to everyone's taste, but I personally like it. As one would expect at this level, there is a full-length back plate.

The card includes a new 16-pin 12VHPWR connector; Asus has included a 4x8-pin adapter for use with older power supplies; adding this to the 75W in the PCIe slot, the card can utilize up to 675W. As with all 4090s, the connectors should be inserted 100% and bent as little as possible.

Huge cards mean huge coolers. It has a vapor chamber, seven heat pipes, and a huge number of fins for excellent heat dissipation. Dotted below the heatsinks are thermal strips to cool the memory chips and VRMs.

The maximum load temperature is a little over 60°C, which is astounding for a 450W card, but at the same time not entirely unexpected for this kind of cooling capacity. In a case, temperatures would be a few degrees higher, but still low; Asus' power consumption was hardly higher than the Founders Edition.

Asus usually has a few extras above and beyond a typical FE card. In addition to monster coolers and high clocks, they have dual BIOS and a switch to choose between default and low-noise settings. In brief tests, there was zero difference between the two; there is also a pair of 4-pin fan headers, very useful for adjusting the speed of external fans according to GPU temperature.

The PCB is simply extreme; the 24-phase design of Asus' 70a stage appears to be built with a much higher TDP in mind. If a future RTX 4090 Ti comes along or if you want to overclock the card with proper cooling, Asus won't sweat it.The PCB is very compact in terms of length. This allows Asus to follow the recent trend of blowing air through part of the card and into the case airflow path from the front to the back.

The video output complement is excellent. DP 2.1, a major weakness of all RTX 4090s, is not included, but dual HDMI 2.1a and three DisplayPort 1.4a are. Up to four ports can be used simultaneously.

So what about its performance, it is quite good, as you can see in the graph below.

A note on my methodology. Where applicable, I ran the benchmark with most of the ray tracing settings enabled. This makes the Radeon RX 6000 card look quite inferior in many cases, but these numbers will be more relevant for the RX 7900 series cards, and all future graphics cards.

Composite gaming performance

1440p gaming performance

4K gaming performance

Surprisingly, Asus did not outperform the Founders Edition as expected. This is due to the way Nvidia's boost algorithm works. If the card is cool enough and has enough power budget, it can clock higher, although during the 10-minute 3DMark Speedway loop, the Asus card averaged 2,776 MHz, easily surpassing its rated boost clock of 2,610 MHz, The same was true for the Founders Edition, which achieved 2,745 MHz.

The difference in performance was not that great, but the Asus Strix was completely silent, not even audible over the AIO fans in my system.

Look at that PCB. If cooled sufficiently, the card should give you plenty of room for overclocking, and while it didn't break the 3GHz barrier, a steady 2,945MHz clock is remarkable for a GPU compared to just a few years ago. That said, every chip is different, and simple tweaks to power limits or fan curves may have a significant impact on overclocking. If you buy a card like this one, be sure to play around with it.

How to judge such a card's price is well outside the level of what the average gamer would consider. But just as a supercharged V8 is not for the average commuter, this is not a card for the average gamer.

The Asus RTX 4090 Strix is extreme in every way. If you want a flagship that looks serious while offering performance, cooling, and low noise levels, this is a great choice. This card will remain the right product for years to come.

Top-tier ROG products usually come with a premium price, but if dropping $1,599 or more on a graphics card is acceptable to you, why not add a few hundred dollars between friends Asus is over the top and, honestly, 98% of overkill and too expensive for gamers, but Asus and other premium RTX 4090s simply have no competition. However, Asus and other premium RTX 4090s have no competition. Given the performance gains over the generations, I can't help but love it.