Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Unfortunately, it seems everything that launches recently is getting struck by bots and scalpers. Not to mention just general stock issues due to the ongoing covid crisis. If you want to check up to date prices and stock, you can do so on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.

Overview

Obviously, the flagship of the Nvidia range doesn’t come cheap. It’s fairly clear to me that the performance difference isn’t about gaming. There are more cores, and it does run faster, but it’s not as far ahead from the RTX 3080 as the RTX 2080 Ti was from the RTX 2080. The performance difference is marginal in some benchmarks due to it being CPU limited.

It sounds silly, even with us using some of the latest processors here, that I don’t think we’re getting everything we can from the RTX 3090 cards. There’s clear CPU limiting in some of the gaming benchmarks. That being said, hitting the limit on these new GPUs still results in record breaking performance, so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

So what are they for? Well, as Andy was saying in the video review, content creation and heavy workstation tasks. They’re marketed as gaming cards too, which is fine, I’m sure the deep pocketed enthusiast market will love them. However, while it’s an expensive “gaming” card it’s half the price of the Titan RTX, and offers some pretty significant performance in Specviewperf, V-Ray, Blender and more.

Furthermore, that wealth of VRAM is insane. For game development and 3D rendering, having all that memory is going to be vital to creating truly next-gen content experiences.

Why Choose the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity?

As I said earlier, this card looks identical to the Zotac Gaming RTX 3080 Trinity, as it uses the exact same PCB and cooler design. Actually, I best make sure I put them back in the right boxes! It’s an MSRP card, which means it’s Zotac’s take on the founders edition or reference model. That should be reflected in the price though, as this could even be cheaper than the FE, while still offering basically the same performance. Despite being a base model, don’t be fooled, this is still one of the fastest consumer GPUs ever created.

Furthermore, Zotac has equipped it with their equally impressive triple fan cooler and a massive heatsink, so even with this level of performance, cooling isn’t really a big issue.

4K and Beyond

When it came to the more extreme end of the gaming spectrum, the Zotac card managed to keep pace with the other RTX 3090’s we’ve tested. It may not have been the fastest, but any performance difference was very small. Impressive really given this isn’t a factory overclocked model. You’ll be able to max out the latest games at 4K with ease, and even 8K gaming proved possible with Doom Eternal hitting 59 FPS! Ray tracing and DLSS is superb too, with all major titles hitting those golden numbers even at 4K.

Should I Buy One?

The RTX 3090 series clearly isn’t for everyone, it’s very expensive and the performance leap from the RTX 3080 isn’t massive. However, for the absolute best performance at extreme resolutions, it’s still the fastest chipset out there. The Zotac card looks great and it performs really well. Furtermore, for workstation tasks, it offers incredible performance thanks to the huge amount of VRAM, and still costs about half that of an RTX Titan.