Packaging

The Card

The RTX 3090 Eagle OC has many design underpinnings from the company's WindForce OC line of graphics cards, but comes with a different cooler shroud design. Its design involves an aluminium dual fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by three fans; two of these are 90 mm and one 80 mm. The one near the display connectors is the smaller of the three. The PCB is shorter than the cooler, so some of the airflow from the third fan flows through the backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 33 x 13 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, Gigabyte uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power inputs. Combined with the PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 375 W.


The GeForce RTX 3090 supports SLI and features a newer-generation NVLink bridge interface, which means you can't use your NVLink bridge from your Turing cards. Be warned that with Ampere, NVIDIA isn't supporting SLI as in implicit multi-GPU (SLI as you know it), but explicit multi-GPU developed and supported by game developers instead. With multi-GPU game support being pretty much non-existent, this basically means SLI is dead. Perhaps creative and 3D modeling applications that support explicit multi-GPU can benefit from SLI.

Teardown

Disassembling the Gigabyte RTX 3090 Eagle OC is fairly straightforward. You undo a set of screws at the backplate and another set underneath, which has the cooler come off clean.


As we mentioned, the cooler is longer than the PCB, so rather than placing its two 8-pin PCIe power connectors where the PCB ends, which is roughly at two-thirds the length of the card, Gigabyte used an elaborate contraption that extends the 8-pin connectors to the edge of the card by implementing internal wiring and a proprietary 8-pin single-row connector internally. It looks to have been integrated with the backplate, but comes off when you undo a pair of screws—there's some extra-high gauge wiring helping things. This also opens up the possibility for Gigabyte to switch the power inputs to three 8-pins, or even the NVIDIA 12-pin, without changing the PCB. Even when integrated with the backplate, this contraption shouldn't get in the way of full-coverage water blocks designed for the card.


Gigabyte is using a metal backplate with the RTX 3090 Eagle OC, which pulls heat from the memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB using thermal pads.