Packaging

The Card

The RTX 4090 Matrix has a very unique design theme that just looks amazing. Various shades of gray are combined with an acrylic window and subtle color differences. Everything is crafted from thick metal, which feels cold to the touch and has a perfect surface structure. To the untrained eye, this looks like an industrial design, not just a combination of front cooler and backplate, with a PCB sandwiched in-between. Very nice job, ASUS!


There is meticulous attention to detail, like the engraved "MATRIX" text.


On the front side you get more elements with a clean design language.


There's subtle RGB illumination zones inside the main cooler, on the radiator's fans and on the backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 28.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2079 g (without the radiator), the total weight including radiator is 3.6 kilos.


Installation requires three slots in your system. The card's width is 50 mm.


ASUS is including a dual BIOS feature with their card. You may enable the secondary "quiet" BIOS, which runs the fans at a more relaxed fan curve, for reduced noise levels. The placement of the switch a bit suboptimal, because it's recessed, which means you need to use a pen or other pointy object to reach the switch.


The radiator is a triple-fan 360 mm model, big enough to tame the heat output of the RTX 4090 GPU. Note how clean the wiring is, thanks to the fans having little pins on the sides, so they can be daisy-chained together easily, without any visible cables.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and two HDMI 2.1a.

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 4x PCIe 8-pin is included, you can also run the card with just three 8-pins.

Teardown

Disassembly of the Matrix is very difficult, and it's highly likely you will break it, unless you have some experience. The biggest problem is that the suction of the liquid metal and the thermal pads is very strong and that there is no wiggle room to make separation of main cooler and PCB easy. I ended up very carefully using plastic prying tools to not scratch or damage anything. Be patient, it will come apart eventually, it took me like 30 minutes. Once you know how it's done this process will go much faster of course.


The main cooler uses a large copper base and provides cooling for the GPU chip, memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The watercooling pump sits on the other side of the base plate, nicely integrated.


As mentioned before, instead of traditional thermal paste, ASUS is using Liquid Metal, which improves thermal transfer, but comes with a risk of short-circuits when not applied properly. That's why ASUS has devised a sort of cover mechanism that protects the GPU's capacitors from the metal paste. Do note the transparent plastic shim under the black tape in the second picture. If you're taking your card apart, you can also apply classic thermal paste after properly cleaning the GPU and heatsink. Your temperatures will end up 6 to 8°C higher than with Liquid Metal (I've tested it).


The backplate is made from thick metal and houses an RGB illumination element.