Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition Review

Up Close

It’s incredible to think how poor manufacturer designed cards used to be. Often they would be a simple single-fan blower style cooler. This meant that absolutely everyone who wasn’t planning to immediately strip the card down for water-cooling would buy a vendor card instead. Recent innovations have meant that this is no longer the case and an official manufacturer card can be just as cool and quiet as a partner card. From the front you don’t get a full indication of quite how beefy the Founders Edition RTX 4090 is.

When Nvidia changed the design of their Founders Edition cards they introduced something which has become a near-standard in cooler designs with their rear cut-out that helps move air away from the card, up towards the top half of your case and thus out. It stopped any cooling dead zones, whilst also helping push the cool air that you normally intake at the bottom/front of your case, to where it helps keep your whole system cool. With the size of the RTX 4090 this is probably needed even more than ever.

  

The side is slightly concave, with a nice, subtle, GeForce RTX logo. The central portion is heavily finned, which you can seem more clearly in the photo above.

  

Power is delivered by the 16 pin connector which uses an adaptor you plug four 8 pin PCIe power connectors into. Suffice to say that cabling can be a bit of a nightmare with this. We can also only see 12 pins here, but Nvidia swear it’s 16 so who are we to argue?

  

The fans are huge. Remember when you might get one tiny fan on a main AMD or Nvidia card? Those days are long gone and the RTX 4090 has some truly massive fans pushing cool air to where it is needed.

  

Rather than blank off the end and cause the generated heat to remain trapped within your system, the extra thick RTX 4090 cooler has enough room to fit the HDMI and three DisplayPort connectors and still have lots of room to exhaust hot air. It’s this photo more than any other than really emphasises the size of the Founders Edition.

  

Chunky, but subtle. Perfect if you prefer the minimalist, classy look for your rig.