Intro

This is part 1 of my Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition review.

Unboxing and Sizing The 3090 Up

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Box

PICTURE OF THE CARD

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition comes in a very slick box and the card is presenting for you just waiting to be taken out of the box and used for your graphics pleasure. You’ve probably seen other reviews and videos of this card and in those videos or reviews the 3090 was probably described as gigantic and long. As far as I’m concerned all of that is misinformation.

If you’ve used other third-party cooler designed cards before then this really isn’t that long. The cooler does a great job at keeping the GPU core nice and cool. I actually really love this cooler design and I’d take it over pretty much every other 3090 out there that I’ve seen.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 In My Case

Setting Up The 3090

Putting the 3090 in my case was pretty easy. Fit perfectly fine. I initially hooked up the card to my SeaSonic Prime Titanium 850w PSU but I found that the overcurrent protection triggered too sensitively. My computer would do this before I had the 3090 installed but now I was sure that it was the PSU causing it so I broke out my old EVGA Bronze 850w PSU and I haven’t had an issue since. I have two monitors right now on my desktop. One is HDMI only using a HDMI to DVI connector and the other one is connected using DisplayPort. When I first connected my main monitor over DisplayPort it was working just fine but after a bit I lost the signal for my 1080p 120hz connection but thankfully 1080p 60hz works just fine. After talking to Wendell he quickly calmed me down, because I thought I broke something, by telling me that the DisplayPort on the 30 series has a lower SNR and that lower quality cables eventually crap out. I bought a new cable from Blue Jeans Cables and that was able to fix my issue with higher refresh rates, which will be a theme.

Simple Synthetic Tests

AIDA64

PassMark PerformanceTest

3DMark Firestrike

3DMark Timespy

Subjective Experience

I’m conflicted as heck right now. This is apparently the fastest card out right now but why can’t I lock 120hz in everything at 1080p? I’m all about high refresh rate and I see more usefulness from smoother motion over pixel density. I’ve been playing a lot of Hitman 3 since it came out around the same time I received the card and I’ve been simply underwhelmed. I’ve also been working on my Strife RTX project and the viewport I work in is 960x540 and I also feel as though the performance is lacking. You’ll hear people say that the RTX 3090 is “overkill” for lower resolutions and that is just plainly false. It is not overkill, it just literally isn’t designed for high refresh and low resolution. I don’t fully understand how this kind of thing happens, but it seems as though Nvidia is putting priority on 4k and 8k instead of where people actually are, which is more so 1080p and 1440p. There are just some workloads that don’t feel as though you are running them on a $1,500 USD MSRP graphics card. That’s if you were able to get it for said MSRP which you really won’t be able to. I cannot in good faith or in any sort of intellectual honesty recommend this card if you game at 1080p or if you value the money in your bank account. This opinion changes if you do more than game and I’ll talk about that in the next part.

Apology

I’m sorry that this took so long to get out. I’m just going to push this out right now unfinished. I have all the data in this here mess of an excel sheet - https://1drv.ms/x/s!AmnRUmIq_QLXi5hFdvIY-k52d-uCuw?e=ko63Nb On December 5th I lost my fiance, I won’t get into details about it mainly because I don’t even have any closure or information. As you know I also just have a lot of things going on mentally besides that. Motivation and mood have been hard, EXTREMELY hard. I don’t mean to taint this review with life crap but yeah. I might come back to this and do the rest of the parts and fix the missing data, among other things. I love you all and please stay safe.