About two years ago we called the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 the Titan, and despite the name, it was a professional graphics card that could serve as a cheaper alternative to professional Quadros while offering better gaming than any consumer alternative performance. Now that the RTX 3090 Ti has arrived, in terms of performance, power consumption and price, it surpasses the Titan and is firmly in the realm of Olympians.
Retailing at £1879 in the UK and $1999 in the US, the RTX 3090 Ti is £480/$500 more expensive than its predecessor – which is already a 33% markup on the pricey part. In exchange, you get a fully unlocked GA102 chip with 2.4% more CUDA cores, 9.4% more boost clock, 7.7% more memory clock, and 29% more power rating. This suggests we’ll see cards that are faster than the original 3090, but at this stage it seems unlikely to get anywhere near 33% extra performance to make the premium worthwhile.
At 450W, you’ll need an 850W or higher power supply to tame the beast — Nvidia notes that a 450W PCIe 5.0 or higher power cord will provide plenty of juice, or three more standard 8-pin PCIe inputs. That’s an Nvidia Founders Edition card, but custom boards offer higher power targets – some rated close to the 525W limit (!) Power delivered via the PCIe connector (75W) and three auxiliary inputs (3x150W), a 1000W PSU recommended ( !!).
| RTX 3090 Titanium | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 Titanium | 2080 Titanium | 1080 Titanium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| graphics processor | GA102 | GA102 | GA102 | TU102 | GP102 |
| CUDA core | 10752 | 10496 | 10240 | 4352 | 3584 |
| video memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 24GB GDDR6X | 12GB GDDR6X | 11GB GDDR6 | 11GB GDDR5X |
| memory bus | 384 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 352 bits | 352 bits |
| bandwidth | 1008GB/sec | 936GB/sec | 912GB/sec | 616GB/sec | 484GB/sec |
| boost clock | 1860MHz | 1695MHz | 1665MHz | 1545MHz | 1582MHz |
| TDP | 450W | 350W | 350W | 250W | 250W |
| Die size | 628mm² | 628mm² | 628mm² | 754mm² | 471mm² |
| transistor | 28B | 28B | 28B | 18.6B | 11.8B |
The subject of our review is the Asus Tuf Gaming RTX 3090 Ti OC Edition from UK tech retailer Box. This model is a 90MHz boost over the reference specification of 1950MHz and features two HDMI 2.1 ports and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports. It has a 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power input, but a 16-pin to triple 8-pin adapter is included in the box to connect it to legacy power. Elsewhere, it’s a standard Asus Tuf Gaming design with a thick 3.2 slot design, three axial fans, aluminum heatsinks that run the length of the board (including dedicated heatsinks for VRAM), and a solid RGB element Aluminum guard. The entire package measures 326x140x63mm (12.8 inches long, 5.5 inches wide, and 2.5 inches thick), so you’ll need a spacious chassis or open-air test bench to accommodate this card.
Our test setup remains unchanged from our past GPU reviews, but if you’re just tweaking right now, here’s a quick summary. We chose the Core i9 10900K system because it offers the best outright gaming performance when the current-gen GPU launches in 2020, and features an Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard, dual-channel G.Skill Trident-Z Royal Box of DDR4-3600 CL16 memory and a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe drive. To keep our CPU performance stable, we clocked all cores to 5GHz and kept them cool with a 240mm Eisbaer Aurora liquid cooler.
Now that you’re familiar with our testbed and have a good idea of the graphics card itself, let’s see how this RTX 3090 Ti performs.
