Palit GameRock RTX 4080 and 4090 Midnight Kaleidoscope OC Review

Conclusion

One thing we’ve never fully understood here at OC3D is brand loyalty. We can appreciate the simplicity or uniformity if you have all the components in your system from a single manufacturer. If for no other reason than you just need a single “control” application running. What we don’t understand about it though is people who dismiss a certain brand or model simply because it’s different. After all, every famous brand today was once new. We remember when Leadtek was the dominant name in graphics cards. This particular writer remembers the day the first Voodoo cards appeared and their eventual superseding by the Riva TNT.

What has this to do with the Palit cards we have reviewed today? Take a straw poll and most people don’t seem be aware of the Palit brand, and if they are they probably don’t own one. Why this is we’ve no idea. As you can see today the two key measures of any graphics card are performance, and cooling. Probably in that order. Whilst the modern GPU Boost technology means that those things are somewhat intertwined, a cooler card also means a quieter one and there are few things more annoying than your system sounding like a vacuum cleaner when you’re trying to play a game. Particularly if your system isn’t locked away in a bedroom but in a room with other people. The Palit GameRock Midnight Kaleidoscope have incredible cooling from that super-thick heatsink and fan combination, and this cooling ensures that the average boost clock, the biggest tell-tale of performance, remains sky high.

The results speak for themselves. Whilst all the 4000 series cards have similar levels of performance, such that you’ll be happy with any of them, the consistently high performance of both the RTX 4080 and particularly the RTX 4090 Palit cards are usually found at the upper reaches of our graphs. The RTX 4080 is a little more up and down, not in a negative way but it just speaks to the closeness of all the RTX 4080s we’ve tested. The RTX 4090 though, thanks to having so much architecture that a few extra clock cycles can bring big performance gains, finds itself at the upper end of our graph more often than not. It’s this unbelievable consistent performance that should put the Palit cards on anyone’s shortlist.

We do, however, understand that the GameRock cards have been flashy bordering on gaudy up to now and that maybe has put a few of you off. The new design, the one that lends this pair of cards their Midnight Kaleidoscope nomenclature, has dampened down the ARGB lighting a little whilst also upping how nice they look when you disable the lighting. It’s got a melanite quality that really looks the business in a suitably lighted system.

The Palit GameRock Midnight Kaleidoscope cards combine fantastic performance, excellent cooling and quiet operation with a more subdued, but still eye-catching, aesthetic that would be the centrepiece of any serious gaming system and win our OC3D Performance Award.

The GameRock RTX 4080 Midnight Kaleidoscope OC is currently available for £1428.

The Gamerock RTX 4090 Midnight Kaleidoscope OC we have not managed to find an in stock price for but MSRP is £1779.99

  

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