ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 OC Review A Monster GPU

Power Consumption Tests

For our power testing, we used AIDA64 to stress the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC, then HWiNFO to monitor power use and temperatures.

For our tests, we use the AIDA64 Stress test, which allows us to stress all aspects of the system. For this test, we selected just the GPU and let it run for about 15 minutes. While at idle, the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC pulls about 33 watts and then loads up to about 450 watts. The max power load can go higher with more strenuous applications or if more advanced overclocking is used.

Cooling Performance

A key reason that we started this series was to answer the cooling question. Blower-style coolers have different capabilities than some of the large dual and triple fan gaming cards. With newer warmer GPUs, we see fewer blower-style coolers. This is certainly a change over this project’s lifetime.

It is clear that the new Ada Lovelace 4000 series GPU has very large cooling heat sinks, so they cool very well. There are a few blower-style versions coming out that we hope to get a chance to look at. We run our tests on an OpenBench Table, so we get very good airflow. When installed in a case, we would advise a case with as much space as possible around the GPU and ample airflow through the case to exhaust heat out the back. Overall, cooling is not a problem. We ran our tests with the 0dB Fan control set to off so the fans would ramp up or down as needed. Even with this setting off, the fans run at low speeds and hardly make any noise. At idle, they sometimes turn off completely.

DirectStorage Benchmark

We also had the opportunity to test DirectStorage SSDs on our test bed to test their capabilities in a game load scenario with DirectStorage. Its bandwidth is measured after GPU decompression.

DirectStorage 1.1 is available in Windows 11 now, so we thought we would take a look at this first version of DirectStorage. Any SSD can use DirectStorage. There are some that have DS features built into the Firmware of the SSD. Here we will use one of these to show what is possible.

Here you can see that it can push 8.68GB of data in 0.43 seconds across the PCIe bus with a Bandwidth of 20.18 GB/s which is near the max the bus can handle. Notice the number of models and textures loaded in this short time. This new tech is primarily targeted at gamers, but we are excited to see if workstation applications, deep learning, etc., will, at some point, incorporate DirectStorage into their code.

Final Words

As we said in the beginning, the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC has been reviewed on many websites and YouTube channels by now. These reviews mostly revolved around its use in gaming setups. It clearly tops all charts in performance, in many cases by a large margin in performance results.

With the new lineup of NVIDIA Ada Lovelace series 4000 graphics cards, we see a drastic increase in power draw, and many may need to upgrade their power supplies to run these new cards. The next problem is the sheer size of these new cards. The ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC is 3.5 slots wide, which on our ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero with the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC installed in the first PCIe slot will cover most of the second PCIe slot leaving only the GPU that can be installed. This can be a real problem if one wishes to run other cards. There are other motherboards with enough spacing that would allow a second card to be installed, but space is very tight, leaving little room for airflow.

Out of the bunch of GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs that were released, the ASUS ROG Strix 4090 OC is about the largest of them all, so case size is another important factor. For those purchasing higher-end workstations like the Threadripper Pro systems we reviewed, a bit selling point is expandability. This card takes a lot of those PCIe expansion slots out of the equation just due to its sheer size. While many may say that the GeForce RTX 4090 is a gaming card, given the purchase price and operating costs, it is going to find its way into many professional settings as well.

A disappointment is NVIDIA did not use DisplayPort 2.0 and instead stuck with DisplayPort 1.4a. The power connector is another controversial topic. Very soon after launch, we started seeing reports of power connectors burning up. It turns out to be a small number of the total number of units sold, but care must be taken when inserting the connector seems to have been the answer. In the lab, we installed and reinstalled our cards many times with no issues.

It is clear that the performance of the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace series cards is a huge jump in performance to the last generation of graphics cards. It even outperforms 2x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 SLI configurations in some cases. Workstation users can get very high-performing setups with a single card which will cut down on production times.

With a single graphics card giving higher performance than SLI rigs of the past, drawing less power and heat, the new 4090s are hard to beat and can really speed up applications that use GPUs.