Nvidia RTX 4090 Graphics Card Review

Operating Costs

With the cost of living increasing across the world, especially when it comes to the cost of electricity, it’s worth looking at the cost of running a processor and how it compares to similar products on the market. By taking the average cost per kWh, we can calculate a rough running cost at idle, during a simulated workload test (Cinebench R23), to give us worst-case scenario costs, as well as gaming costs during a run of Cinebench R23.

US Dollars (USD)

So sticking with power, another big area comes down to the cost of running the cards, especially given the price of electricity increasing across the world and in the US, we see the MSI card at idle coming in around double that of the 3090 Ti at just over half a cent per hour.

At load, you’d be looking at around 5.4 cents per hour to run, which is actually around 17% cheaper per hour to run than the 3090 Ti Gaming OC which the Gigabyte 4090 comes in around 14% cheaper to run per hour than the 3090 Ti Gaming OC.

British Pound (GBP)

In the UK, it doesn’t exactly fair great for the MSI card, which will end up costing around 1.35 pence per hour just sitting at the desktop, which is 98% higher than the 3090 Ti while the 4090 from Gigabyte is only 29% higher to run at idle when looking at the cost per hour.

At load, it’s not a cheap one, but electricity isn’t cheap in the UK with a cost coming in at just under 12 pence per hour on the MSI 4090 and just over 12 pence per hour on the Gigabyte Gaming OC, though again, I’d consider that the MSI figures may be a little wrong based on this, lets call it, bug. Compared to the 3090 Ti, we obviously see the same 17% decrease in cost for the MSI and 14% for the Gigabyte.