NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition sees the green giant turn the page on its successful GeForce "Ampere" generation with the next generation "Ada." Named after Ada Lovelace, the new architecture sees the company leverage the 5 nm TSMC foundry node to nearly double the CUDA cores, significantly increase clock-speeds, and embrace 3rd generation RTX technology, which sees the introduction of the much more capable 3rd Gen RT core, 4th Gen Tensor core for AI acceleration; and the faster "Ada" CUDA core with shader reordering capabilities; all coupled with GDDR6X memory. NVIDIA has consistently delivered massive generational performance uplifts, and this expectation remains with the RTX 40-series, especially given the on paper specifications.



NVIDIA allowed us to share with you some of the first pictures of the cards we have in hand, particularly their unboxing, retail packaging, and what the card looks like in the flesh. We aren't allowed to post performance numbers for any of the cards, yet. For those, you'll have to check back next week. For now, we still have enough eye-candy to get you to drool—six graphics cards including the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition, the de facto reference-design. Besides this, we have the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 O24G, the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM Liquid X, the Palit RTX 4090 GameRock, the Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan, and the GIGABYTE RTX 4090 Gaming OC.



The RTX 4090 Founders Edition (FE) sees the company double down on the Dual-Axial Flow-Through cooling architecture it debuted with the RTX 30-series "Ampere," with several updates to keep up with the monstrous new GPU. The new ROG Strix is easily the most cyberpunk design from ASUS, and is sure to be the most attractive thing inside your case. Something similar can be said about the Palit GameRock, with its "Midnight Kaleidoscope" design, which manages to blend heavy-metal and color in a manner we've never seen. The MSI SUPRIM Liquid X in my opinion is the closest any partner got to the design-finesse of the NVIDIA Founders Edition, while still maintaining originality. The Colorful Vulcan and GIGABYTE Gaming OC are among the most affordable custom-design RTX 4090 you'll find, with every effort being made not to look worth the near pricing (USD $1,599 is the NVIDIA baseline). As of October 6th, we've updated this article with the Zotac AMP Extreme AIRO, which came in late due to a shipping problem.

In this article, we unbox each of the GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" graphics cards we have, to show you what the box looks like, what else is in the box, and what the cards physically look like up-close. You'll have to check back next week for the performance reviews for each of the cards.