Packaging

The Card

Visually, the ASUS STRIX uses a mix of black and various shades of gray; nice shininess there indeed. The front of the cooler shroud is made out of plastic, while the backplate is metal.


Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1747 g.


These GeForce RTX 3090 Ti cards are enormous in size. From top left to top right: the EVGA RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 Ultra, Zotac RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme, MSI RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X, and ASUS RTX 3090 Ti STRIX Liquid Cooled.

See the small AMD card in the bottom left? That's the Radeon RX 6900 XT, the fastest card the red team currently offers. Also included is the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition in the bottom right. $10,000 in graphics cards right there!


Installation requires three slots in your system.


The dual BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "Performance" BIOS and the "Quiet" BIOS that runs the fans at lower speeds.


Display connectivity options include two HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports.


This looks like an area that overclockers and voltmodders will want to play with—a shame the labels aren't more self-explanatory.


The card puts out two 4-pin PWM case fan headers, which are running at a synchronized speed with the graphics card fan. This makes it extremely easy to build a low-noise case. When not gaming and heat is low, the case fans will be stopped. Once your gaming sessions starts and the card heats up, the case fans will start spinning to exhaust hot air from the graphics card out of the case.


The RTX 3090 Ti introduces the new 16-pin power connector—note the four small pins above the larger 12 pins. This connector is specified for up to 600 W power delivery. All RTX 3090 Ti cards come bundled with a 3x 8-pin to 12-pin adapter (the four small sense pins aren't used). While the ATX specification technically states that if the four small sense pins aren't connected, the card should limit itself to 150 W, NVIDIA made sure even the 3x 8-pin adapter scenario, which can provide 525 W total (3x 150 W + 75 W from the slot), runs the card at optimal settings.


The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti supports SLI, but be warned that NVIDIA isn't supporting SLI as implicit multi-GPU (SLI as you know it), but explicit multi-GPU that's developed and supported by game and application developers only. With multi-GPU game support being pretty much non-existent, this basically means SLI is dead.

Teardown

The main liquid-cooling component is a Gen 7 Asetek AIO pump block that pulls heat from the GPU and memory chips through a large, square copper base, which also touches the memory chips. A secondary aluminium heatsink ventilated by a lateral-blower cools other components, such as the VRM.


A high-quality aluminium backplate finishes things off. This is one of the best backplate designs I've ever encountered—massive, thick, and with some surface structure.


The 240 mm radiator is of standard thickness and includes a pair of 25 mm-thick 120 mm fans.