ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC Review: Good Overkill

The team at GameRant takes a closer look at the current performance king of the hill for GPUs: The ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition

The ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition is a beast no matter how you put it, marrying Nvidia's latest RTX 4090 GPU into its own custom ROG design that offers some of the best thermals and power delivery in the business.

It is also quite pricey relative to most RTX 4090 SKUs available in the market thanks to its most sought-after status resulting in it consistently going out of stock or moving at scalped prices of late. This has in turn caused it to both bask in its premium status thanks to the high MSRP and scalper margins as well as become a collectible when it comes to the white edition of the same which is far more notorious to locate even now, in a market that is cooling off otherwise when it comes current generation GPUs.

And In 4K Bind Them

The ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Edition may be one of its largest GPUs ever, but the patented design supports the most potent overclocking potential out of its peers. With a vapor chamber in tow, the ROG Strix comes in both black and white and does not disappoint in either looks or power. It is easily the most powerful 4090 out there, clocking at a stable 3120 Mhz in our own tests.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC is considered the best RTX 4090 money can buy because of its excellent vapor-chamber centric cooler, high boost clocks, a unique design aesthetic and build quality that surpasses Nvidia's own FE offerings as well as most if not all of its direct competitors. With 24GB of GDDR6X Ram, an RTX 4090 at its core, and the ROG badge, the Strix RTX 4090 OC comes to play ball all geared up for a fight, and it does not lose.

The Limited Edition ROG-themed Ring that ships with the white RTX 4090 Strix OC

The build quality department is where the Asus RTX 4090 Strix OC excels, heads and shoulders above most of its peers with only the MSI Suprim X coming close if at all to ASUS's flagship which uses top-notch components and materials to birth the large, 3.5-slot GPU that currently dominates performance charts with ease out of the box. You tend to notice the sheer amount of plastic shroud the GPU is encased in, which you should carefully remove as it is relatively easy to forget a piece here or there.

The first thing we noticed with ASUS's top-tier RTX 4090 GPU was its sheer heft. We have previously worked with the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X (Air-cooled) as well as Gigabyte's Gaming OC variant, both of which feel considerably lighter than the Strix which feels like a solid block of premium metal, which we suspect was ASUS's intention.

The RTX 4090 is the pinnacle of performance at the time of writing; it has no consumer-grade peers in terms of GPU prowess for gaming and with good reason: Nvidia competitor AMD skipped on making one because it felt that it was not a market it could make a lot of headway in.

The RTX 4090 Strix OC builds onto that by offering some of the highest clocks out of the box in the industry for an RTX 4090 and the SKUs we did handle (both white and black units) boosted quite well, routinely pushing past 3GHz with ease in titles such as Forza Horizon 5, Hogwarts: Legacy and more. Thanks to the massive cooling block that the RTX 4090 Strix OC has, temperatures seldom climb beyond 70 degrees, even in adverse conditions (no air conditioning in the summer). It runs quietly for the most part with audible coil whine at times, but your experience can vary from card to card (for the coil whine part).

The RTX 4090 Strix OC White & Black SKUs sitting next to each other. Note: Serial numbers are removed where visible as we used units we purchased via retail channels for this review.

The RTX 4090 Strix OC is a card that will tend to polarize most reviewers or tech enthusiasts depending on what they expected, what ASUS delivered, and more importantly how it delivered on its promise of the best RTX 4090 GPU in the market. This is something that will be increasingly true given that ASUS is now marketing a liquid metal touting ROG Matrix RTX 4090 GPU which is expected to be sold at higher MSRPs than ASUS's sub $2,000 prices for the Strix, Strix OC, and Strix OC White variants.

The ASUS ROG Matrix is expected to cost more than the RTX 4090 Strix OC and is a limited edition release that will make it more of a collectible than a mainstream product relative to the RTX Strix 4090 OC which is even today, somewhat notoriously difficult to find, especially in white color at MSRP.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 has a presence in any room; That much is something anyone who has seen it in person is unable to deny. We are fans of the overall design and cooling block as well as the sturdy backplate, all of which make the Strix feel (rightfully) like the most premium RTX 4090 GPU.

The design has excellent RGB on offer, but the effects are subtle, something we do like, arguably even over its more RGB-centric competitors that come with more extras such as the Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan. Choosing between the white and the black SKUs is a tough call and your PC case, aesthetic and overall look you are going for will make it an easier or harder call depending on what you think is the best.

For us, the ROG Ring's bragging rights alone seemed to tip the scales coupled with more people on our review team pushing for the white variant of the Strix rather than the black SKU available at launch. Some part of this could be due to us jokingly referring to the black version as the 'Pepsi edition given its standard RGB lighting theme did result in the name sticking for the rest of our review internally. There are however no bad choices between the two and depending on which version you feel fits your aesthetic needs, the black and the white are equal contenders.

The RTX 4090 Strix is a quiet performer as we mentioned earlier with fans barely kicking in at full load and the GPU oscillating between the 65 to 70 degrees (Celsius) mark for the majority of our tests while gaming. The beefy cooler allows for it to boost better than the competition with both GPUs we tested routinely pushing past 3GHz with ease. While our black unit did boost higher than the white on occasion, it was within the margin of error (± 50MHz); We did not apply custom overclocks during our tests or tweak fan curves, however as some more in-depth hardware reviews do since the focus was on checking performance out of the box as part of our testing.

One can not have a frank discussion about the RTX 4090 without considering its most important factor: the price. The Strix doubles down on this by adding a hefty premium ($2,000 for the Black and $2100 for the White units at MSRP on most sites). While we understand that the Strix OC is a premium tier SKU and debatably the best RTX 4090 you can buy, a premium of $500 on the base Founders Edition RTX 4090 (which is no slouch either) seems to be rather excessive as the RTX 4090 already prices itself out most retail consumers' reach from the onset.

An argument can be made and justifiably so that the Strix is aimed at the top tier of enthusiasts who have the means to buy an RTX 4090 OC to begin with. That doesn't make the price sting less however especially since both our test SKUs of the RTX 4090 had some measure of coil whine when under load. While coil whine is something that will happen with most GPUs and can subside after some time (as it did in our white unit, but remains audible in our black SKU), one would expect that paying a premium here would allow for testing to eliminate or at least mitigate this issue altogether on the Strix.

The RTX 4090 Strix OC paired with the ASUS Helios GX601 & The Ryujin II 360 ARGB Cooler

Another issue, which to be fair is the case with most RTX 4090 SKUs, but slightly more compounded on the Strix is the large size of the GPU thanks to its heatsink, vapor chamber, and design that makes it impossible to fit in most cases. We did easily manage to fit this in the ASUS Helios GX601 (shown above) and the Lian Li O11 Dynamic XL, but it visibly shows that it could be a tight fit in many other cases that we would otherwise recommend.

If you are going a full ROG build and have picked up their latest full tower Hyperion case, this might be a moot point, however, as most larger cases will be able to accommodate the RTX 4090 with ease thanks to them having plenty of space and width on offer.

If you could define the RTX 4090 Strix OC in two words, it would be Subtle Power. The RTX 4090 Strix OC is arguably the best GPU on the market that money can buy (at least until the Matrix launches in Q3 2023). The RTX 4090 is a hefty purchase thanks to both, the impact on your wallet potentially and the volume of the card, with the accompanying weight in tow. That being said, it isn't the flashiest RTX 4090 SKU out there; It simply doesn't need to be given that its design and aesthetic make it look much more premium than its competition even if it skips on an LCD/OLED display and liquid cooling altogether.

Its price tag does however admittedly make it a bitter pill to swallow for all but those determined to get the best GPU money can buy in 2023 and it does face stiff competition thanks to its significant premium versus the competition. All in all, if you are going with the RTX 4090 Strix in either color, you can't really go wrong given the sheer amount of power under the hood that is kept running at its maximum potential thanks to its beefy cooler.

If you are planning to game on the RTX 4090 Strix OC and plan to build a PC around it, you might want to consider upgrading your CPU to avoid a bottleneck given what Nvidia's latest and greatest is capable of in terms of raw power in most games.

The Asus Strix RTX 4090 OC is arguably one of the best GPUs on the market and a strong contender for the best RTX 4090 based on its performance, cooling, and overclockability alone. That being said, you might want to go for a cheaper, smaller or simply a liquid-cooled RTX 4090 instead. The team at GameRant has you covered in this regard as we offer a detailed breakdown of which RTX 4090s we feel currently rule the gaming and performance roost in 2023 and why.

If you are confused about whether you wish to go for an RTX 4090 or an RTX 4080, it really does come down to budget and preference. The RTX 4090 is overkill, but in a good way that allows you to turn everything up to max and not worry about your card not being able to handle it while the RTX 4080 can also handle pretty much everything you throw at it, albeit at a much lesser level than Nvidia's finest.

If you decide to go for an RTX 4080 instead, our team has you covered with some of our best picks in terms of value, performance, and aesthetics in our constantly updated guide.

A: In a way yes, it has all the tools available and comes with some of the best underlying hardware money can buy. At the same time, a lot comes down to your 'silicon lottery' luck at the chip level too with some chips able to sustain higher clocks and lower voltages than others, allowing them to overclock well. The Strix may see competition from GPUs that have better dies that could theoretically outperform some SKUs, but the odds of you ending up with an absolutely faster, stable overclock on the Strix OC remain higher than most of its competition.

A: The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC consumes anywhere up to 450W at stock overclocks and can push past the 550W when manually overclocked but most games will see power draw well under or around the 450W mark in general.

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As a hobbyist system builder that made it a professional engagement, Rahim tends to know more about computers than the average Joe. It comes at a price: He won't let you get away without getting the best value-for-money PC components out there.