Gigabyte RTX 3090 Gaming OC 24G Review

Up Close

If you were here for our review of the Gigabyte Gaming RTX 3080 then this will all be very familiar. One of the big benefits to modern cooler designs is how flexible they are. What works for one card will surely work for another.

  

The RTX 3090 is a beefy card to be sure, and the triple fan Windforce cooler looks the part, with a simple aesthetic that screams no nonsense. We’re not entirely sure how much we dislike the deep cutaway near the bracket, but we’re sure Gigabyte have a good reason for it being there.

  

With a large vented backplate you can be sure that the heat load will be spread across the PCB, removing any possibility of the card warping when things get toasty. With such a large heatsink and plentiful vents and fans it isn’t likely to get too hot anyway, certainly if the performance of this cooler on the RTX 3080 is a guideline.

  

We’re old enough to remember when copper cooling was a headline feature, a bit like when all our headphone jacks were suddenly gold-plated, but that doesn’t reduce how much we love seeing bare copper heatpipes bristling from beneath the shroud.

  

None of the partner cards we’ve reviewed have the same design as the Founders Edition cooler, but the vents on the Windforce cooler at least go some way towards bringing high airflow through the card from your floor and intake fans to their card. Anything that helps dissipate heat is a good thing, and this was successful on the Ampere Gigabyte card we looked at last week.

  

Our first big surprise comes in the form of the power connectors which stick to the 8+8 we saw on the RTX 3080. Given the specifications we were expecting three 8 pins here. It’ll help with cable routing for sure.

  

No your eyes do not deceive you. SLI fingers. SLI fingers on an RTX 3090. Given how much effort Nvidia have put into producing a single card with the performance of the old SLI setups, we can’t imagine who’d be rich enough to run two of these, but hey, maybe you’ve just won the lottery, or your rich Uncle kicked the bucket.

  

Connections are two HDMI 2.1 – that support 8K60 – and three v1.4 DisplayPorts. No Type-C here.