NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition

[W1zzard]

The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition is NVIDIA's mightiest card from the Ampere lineup. We previously looked at various custom designs. Today, we're checking out the Founders Edition to test how well it does in terms of heat and noise, and whether it's an alternative to the even more expensive custom designs.

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[Durvelle27]

Wow the value of this is so bad

 

[RedelZaVedno]

Ngreedia is exploring new horizons. $2000 room heater that can game. A winner on cold winter nights & a heatstroke challenger on hot summer days. What more can one ask for?

 

[NDown]

lol and here i thought the 2080Ti value was BAD when it was launched

 

[RedelZaVedno]

Joking aside, dGPU market is totally FU atm I'm afraid AMD & Ngreedia are flirting more and more with "audiophile" territory. I can imagine dGPUs targeting only the rich & "kidney sellers", everyone else being sentenced to APUs or consoles in just a few years time

 

[Just Some Noise]

This is why we need Intel Arc to be competetive.
NVidia clearly only wants a halo product with the 3090 Ti.
And lets be honest, i do not think that AMD will be any better with the refreshed RX6XXX Series.

So lets hope Intel will do something good for the market with their graphics cards.

 

[ModEl4]

3 slots 450W, i wonder if AD102 will be 4 slots then

 

[PapaTaipei]

450 watts 82 degrees celcius 42 db = NO

 

[wheresmycar]

Dear Nvidia,

Please ignore all the haters. All they do is complain.

I'm really impressed, its only $2000. Thanks NVIDIA!! you're the best I sold my car last time to get a 2080 TI. I'm your biggest fan. For the 3090 TI i'm now selling my house, YAY. Love you lots, can't wait for the 4080 TI so I can throw myself under a bus and claim compensation. Should be enough I hope.

Yours sincerely,

X X X
(thats not my name, *wink* *wink*)

 

[mechtech]

"That's why we went the extra mile and purchased one of these $2000 cards to answer those questions."

Then returned it after testing for a full refund since it wasn't really what we wanted.

 

[Valantar]

Wow the value of this is so bad

The power consumption is worse

@W1zzard i
I have to point out the part of the conclusion where you say

Spending $2000 on a graphics card for your favorite hobby is possible for most middle-class workers in western countries, and those are not even considered "rich."

That's... dubious. Maybe for people with no other financial obligations. For anyone else, not even close. The median wage in the US is less than $20 000/year. Of course that's due to the US having a massive working class, many of which are better classified as working poor, with the middle class shrinking alongside stagnant wages for decades. But still, Saying "most middle class workers" can afford spending 10% of the country's median wage on a single item for a hobby? That's a significant stretch. There are absolutely plenty of not-rich people out there with expensive hobbies (cars, motorcycles, mountain bikes, photography, etc.), but that's still a relatively small group of relatively privileged people. "Most" is nowhere near accurate, and ultimately just serves to justify what is a ludicrous price for an overall ludicrous product.

 

[venturi]

Actually, the temps on both cards in the same rig under max load have not gotten higher than 71C, ever. So I am not sure where the testers got up to 80C.
Most games, maxed graphics, max settings, 4k, 10bit color, don't get the cards warmer than 69C. but usually hover around 63C. I get to 71C if I hammer them with some DL algorithms for over a few hours.

Bare in mind the temps might be lower if I was only using one card at a time.


at 4K

 

[Fluffmeister]

Nvidia just don't care anymore, they are rolling in cash. And with AMD also milking the market, they can do as they please.

Well played.

 

[TechLurker]

Frankly, I'm more amazed at how well the 6900XT aged, while being half the cost. I do wonder if the refreshed 6950XT might be a closer match while still being cheaper and relatively more efficient.

 

[skizzo]

Frankly, I'm more amazed at how well the 6900XT aged, while being half the cost. I do wonder if the refreshed 6950XT might be a closer match while still being cheaper and relatively more efficient.

as someone who got a RX 6900 XT just the other month, even paying extra $100 to the ebay scalper scheme.....but even with that said.....I feel I made the best purchase for "bang for your buck" compared to equivalent performance from Nvidia. why would I pay twice that for this card? the charts suggest RX 6900 XT is better in several games and at higher res when 3090 Ti pulls ahead, well the difference between getting 124FPS or 129FPS in a game (RE8), or 170FPS vs 180FPS (Doom Eternal)...again, why would someone pay double, another $1000, for such a minor improvement. This would amount to only about 5% or 6% real world improvement that no one could tell without using monitoring/measuring methods, no one can see that with their naked eye

so I learned something here, apparently an extra 8GB of totally unnecessary (for gaming) VRAM costs ~$1000

 

[Valantar]

Actually, the temps on both cards in the same rig under max load have not gotten higher than 71C, ever. So I am not sure where the testers got up to 80C.
Most games, maxed graphics, max settings, 4k, 10bit color, don't get the cards warmer than 69C. but usually hover around 63C. I get to 71C if I hammer them with some DL algorithms for over a few hours.

Bare in mind the temps might be lower if I was only using one card at a time.


at 4K
View attachment 245511

I don't know what benchmark you're running there, but it's clearly not scaling all that well across two GPUs, considering they're both far from 100% utilization.

As for the temps in the review, did you miss the post where they are noise normalized? This is the only way to do like-for-like comparisons across coolers, so that makes sense. The cooler can obviously do more, it'll just be noisy while doing so. What you're saying just de demonstrates that Nvidia has set a rather aggressive fan curve on this card.

 

[Flydommo]

My hope is the upcoming (upper) mid-range cards such as the RTX 4060/70 will deliver good performance gains over my current GTX 1080 TI FE at a much lower TGP of around 300 Watt so that it will be physically much smaller and quieter than this 3090 TI behemoth of a graphics card. I would prefer a two slot design to fit in my Ghost S1 but maybe only the 4060 will be able to correspond to this form factor. We shall see...

 

[W1zzard]

The power consumption is worse

@W1zzard i
I have to point out the part of the conclusion where you say

That's... dubious. Maybe for people with no other financial obligations. For anyone else, not even close. The median wage in the US is less than $20 000/year. Of course that's due to the US having a massive working class, many of which are better classified as working poor, with the middle class shrinking alongside stagnant wages for decades. But still, Saying "most middle class workers" can afford spending 10% of the country's median wage on a single item for a hobby? That's a significant stretch. There are absolutely plenty of not-rich people out there with expensive hobbies (cars, motorcycles, mountain bikes, photography, etc.), but that's still a relatively small group of relatively privileged people. "Most" is nowhere near accurate, and ultimately just serves to justify what is a ludicrous price for an overall ludicrous product.

Go through all your peers and ask yourself "could they buy a $2000 thing if they really wanted it"

 

[Frick]

Go through all your peers and ask yourself "could they buy a $2000 thing if they really wanted it"

The key word here is peer. Valantar lives in Sweden and has a good job. His peers are much more well off than say an american working minimim wage, or a swede working minimum wage for that matter and the price for this is an entire months income.

But sure, technically you are probably correct, but for me too that phrasing is slightly problematic probably, but whatevs. vOv

 

[W1zzard]

but for me too that phrasing is slightly problematic probably

I know, right, for me too, but I just felt that I had to share that thought, because all I hear is "omg $x, so expensive, impossible, crazy, nobody can afford this, the world is going to end"

 

[Valantar]

Go through all your peers and ask yourself "could they buy a $2000 thing if they really wanted it"

I already know that the vast majority of them would laugh out loud at that question. My parents' generation, sure, that's not unlikely. But millennials or younger? Not a chance. I make just about the median Norwegian income, in a two-person household with two incomes (which makes me better off economically than most of my peers), without a car and with relatively reasonable housing expenses. I could, maybe, do something like that every... 2-3 years, if I saved carefully? But most of the time life eats up those kinds of savings pretty quickly. I probably could if I gave up on all holiday travel and cut down severely on socializing, concerts, etc., but.... well, that's hardy "being able to afford it". If you have to sacrifice everything else to get something, you can't reasonably afford it.

 

[W1zzard]

I probably could if I gave up on all holiday travel and cut down severely on socializing, concerts, etc.

I would say that's the definition of "being able to afford", I do get your point though. Still.. how is Apple raking in hundreds of billions, people apparently can afford $1000+ iPhones and spend another $1000 on shit apps/games/in-app-purchases. So you might buy a used Nokia instead but get RTX 3090 Ti instead? Isn't it just a matter of priority if you choose PC gaming over Instagram, Tiktok or Onlyfans? I look out on the streets (yes, in Germany, rich country, $30kish median), and see everybody with iPhone or big Android phones, and it's not like the situation is different in many places in India

 

[Frick]

I would say that's the definition of "being able to afford", I do get your point though. Still.. how is Apple raking in hundreds of billions, people apparently can afford $1000+ iPhones and spend another $1000 on shit apps/games/in-app-purchases. So you might buy a used Nokia instead but get RTX 3090 Ti instead? Isn't it just a matter of priority if you choose PC gaming over Instagram, Tiktok or Onlyfans? I look out on the streets (yes, in Germany, rich country, $30kish median), and see everybody with iPhone or big Android phones, and it's not like the situation is different in many places in India

People get phones with plans though. I do too, even if I could buy the phone. €30/month for 36 months is ok, €1080 in one go is a lot (my phone, Sony 5iii was actually cheaper with the plan).

 

[Valantar]

I know, right, for me too, but I just felt that I had to share that thought, because all I hear is "omg $x, so expensive, impossible, crazy, nobody can afford this, the world is going to end"

There are absolutely a lot of people who can afford that in some way. But given that, for example, the US is a country lf ~320 million people where some proportion has a household income of >$150 000, that's a given, especially with the increasing social acceptance and popularity of gaming. That doesn't make this even remotely affordable for "most" middle class workers, let alone most people. It's still a ludicrously expensive luxury product, and trying to "well, actually" that just makes you come off as severely out of touch with reality.

I would say that's the definition of "being able to afford".

Then we have very different understandings of that term. You did say it was "possible", and that's a very, very broad term, but if your meaning is "it would be possible if they made major sacrifices for it", then you're sabotaging your own argument, as that just illustrates that even for relatively well off people, this is mostly entirely out of reach. (Especially considering that it has a useful lifespan of... 5 years? I kept my Fury X for 6, and that was a stretch.)

How is Apple raking in hundreds of billions, people apparently can afford $1000+ iPhones and spend another $1000 on shit apps/games/in-app-purchases. So you might buy a used Nokia instead but get RTX 3090 Ti instead? Isn't it just a matter of priority if you choose PC gaming over Instagram, Tiktok or Onlyfans? I look out on the streets (yes, in Germany, rich country, $30kish median), and see everybody with iPhone or big Android phones, and it's not like the situation is different in many places in India

Some severe differences here:
-the day-to-day importance of smartphones in people's lives vastly outstrips "hobby"
-the number of people spending $1000 on mobile purchases in a year is tiny. That is whale territory, and those represent a tiny proportion of players/users.
-smartphones, especially iphones, are relatively repairable and have an extremely active second-hand market, making for cheaper access to used premium devices
-phones are also regularly sold with significant rebates on what essentially amounts to zero-interest payment plans
-a lot of people get into serious debt due to society's push to always have the new, cool tech (and clothes, and other accessories)
-there is essentially no possible world where a GPU in your gaming PC will carry the same broad-reaching social capital as carrying a premium smartphone, making the threshold for entry much, much higher towards making severe sacrifices to get ahold of one.
-on the reverse of that, not everyone has the luxury of making these types of choices freely, especially in our tech-obsessed world. Buying a cheap phone might not see you ostracized, but what if all your friends have iphones and have an imessage group chat? Either you get an iPhone or you're left out.

The point being: everything is a question of priorities and balancing various factors, and the number of people who can either make these choices or have sufficient money to not need to make hard prioritizations to afford a $2000 GPU is overall very low. Arguing that "well actually, this is still within reach" is a shifting of the goal posts that just makes you sound incredibly out of touch with the increasing precarity and economic insecurity experienced by most people today.

 

[Richards]

Actually, the temps on both cards in the same rig under max load have not gotten higher than 71C, ever. So I am not sure where the testers got up to 80C.
Most games, maxed graphics, max settings, 4k, 10bit color, don't get the cards warmer than 69C. but usually hover around 63C. I get to 71C if I hammer them with some DL algorithms for over a few hours.

Bare in mind the temps might be lower if I was only using one card at a time.


at 4K
View attachment 245511

The card is very efficient in non gaming tasks