Gigabyte RTX 3090 Ti Gaming OC 24G Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

When it comes to pricing on PC components, especially graphics cards, it’s still a horrible thing to try and pinpoint, because while it could be one price today, it could be a completely different one tomorrow, so let’s try to break it down much more simply. A “reference spec” RTX 3090 Ti comes with an MSRP price of £1879/$1999 and while Gigabyte does generally have lower-end cards within each range, their base model within the 3090 Ti product stack is the Gaming, which features the same cooler as the Gaming OC we have here, but without the factory overclock as standard. I can tell you now, that the Gaming models generally do demand a premium over a reference spec, and a factory overclocked card goes a little further beyond that. With today’s current climate, I think it’s fair to assume that you could pay around 10-15% extra for this card, but as stock is still a fickle thing, it’s hard to give you a definitive answer.

Overview

We’ve always been clear at eTeknix that Gaming OC cards from Gigabyte are amazing. Not in the sense that they’re the best at this or the best at that, but they do what they’re supposed to do. The cost a little more, but you get a little more, and that’s not just in one area. It’s not like you get performance, at the sake of a lousy cooler or vice versa. Instead, you get a happy middle ground of strong performance, great cooling potential and reasonably quiet acoustics, especially when compared to their direct competitors, and sometimes you’ll likely see it trade blows with the big boys which can sometimes cost even more money.

Performance-wise, it’s a 3090 Ti. I can’t relay it any clearer. It was launched to be the best, and it is the best, but, and it’s a big point that I need to make. This card is not for everyone. When going through our benchmarks, you’ll see, and it’s more evident in the lower resolutions, that the card essentially acts as a bottleneck for the titles we tested and in a lot of tests, the lower-end RTX 3080 or 3080 Ti performed better, and this brings me to my original point, that, just like the RTX 3090, they are Titan cards in drag. Sure at 4K they bring the fight and I’m sure if we broke out the 8K display, we’d see some stunning visuals while still getting super strong performance, but realistically, how many people are doing that?

For content creators, like ourselves, using 6K and 12K Black Magic cameras, a card like this is a godsend, as the applications we use will chew through that 24GB of VRAM like button, and have that little extra boost in performance over the non-Ti can shave off rendering times and help save time, and in a lot of content creation businesses, time equals money, and that’s why a card of this calibre demands exactly that.

Should I Buy One?

Overall, it’s the best consumer graphics card on the market right now, and I feel it won’t be beaten, until NVIDIA beat it themselves, with the impending 4000 series of GPUs, but until then I’ll say this. It’s not for everyone, but that doesn’t even really matter. If you need it, you’ll get it. If you want it, you’ll get it. If you can’t afford it, you’ll dream of it and that’s all there is to it.