RTX 4XXX Thread

James Skinner said:

Hi all, been lurking on this thread for a while as been wanting to upgrade my 6900xt for better VR performance. Can anyone tell me though whether it's actually worth spending several hundred more £ on a 'better' AIB card? For instance there's a Gainward Phantom for £1549 here in the UK, vs a MSI Gaming X Trio for £1748, or at the higher end a Suprim X for £1899, all have solid reviews, but can anyone suggest I will be getting better real world performance for the extra £? For the record I'm not super bothered about noise as running a wind sim which will drown out anything (rig only used for sim), and heat shouldn't be too much of a problem as case is very cooling focused. Are there any other things I should consider? (Aside from the fact they are still ridiculously expensive!)

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No. They're identical. Literally a waste of money unless...maybe...if you go down to the absolute lowest models then...maybe...they won't be safe if you want to run the card at 600 W even that I doubt but...maybe.

I have the MSI Gaming non-X Trio (non-'X" means non-"OC" model). It doesn't have the vapor chamber cooler, it also won't allow you to go past 450 W (even though it's supposed to allow 480 W with the power limit slider). Further more, it only comes with a 3-PCI-E adapter instead of 4 which sort of hard-limits it to 450 W.

I got a 4 PCI-E adapter and first flashed the MSI Suprim X BIOS for 520 W out of curiosity, and then the Gigabyte Gaming BIOS for 600 W. Now I can run the card to it's fullest. I have the memory at +1000 and the core OC'd so it always runs close to 3100 MHz without dropping thanks to the power limit...all while staying in the 60s degrees.

Those clockspeeds are not any better than with the original BIOS overclock but now the core clock speeds don't drop, or barely do, unless reaching 600 W which 99.9 % of games won't do.

Anyone paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars more for higher models is LITERALLY wasting their money for absolutely nothing. Think of the stupidly, ridiculous huge and expensive ASUS ROG Strix. Humungous card but, what's worse is it's absolutely insanely overpriced price while, in reality, offering nothing except e-peen.

With regards to overclocking:

- unlike most cards, the 4090 usually gains more from memory clocks than core. If you get a card that, say, allows +1500 MHz on the memory but can't do more than, say, 2975 MHz on the core, you got a good card

- don't waste your money paying extra for the more overclocked versions like the "OC", the "X", etc. You can literally do the same with an OCing program like MSI Afterburner. Those cards, nor higher model cards in general, don't have any better chance to overclock more than non-"OC" chips. It's literally just a money grab directed towards uneducated consumers. The models that have chips which are tested to be able to overclock more (AKA binned chips) are usually only special, highly limited edition cards like EVGA "Kingpin" cards of previous generations. I don't even think the limited edition Galax OC Lab / OC Lab Plus 4090 with 666 W power limit and 2x 12VHPWR connectors is binned (but not 100% sure).

- with regards to binning and 4090s, there are people suggesting that Nvidia is keeping the better chips for themselves for their 4090 FE versions - especially with regards to memory. Some people have said that the FE cards have a higher chance of OCing the memory to the +1400 - +1800 range than non-FE cards but take this with a gran of salt; it's what some people are saying but I haven't researched it enough (nor do I care to) to be entirely convinced of it.

P.S. You can still easily be GPU-limited with a 4090.

RasmusP said:

So I guess you'll have to decide whether or not to buy a GPU within the next 5 years or not, lol

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Agreed. I think I'm gonna pull the pin sooner rather than later, still unsure what it'll be though

RasmusP said:

But we only tested Flight Simulator, where you don't really have fast paced inputs

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Mmm, I'm fairly confident that one of the games with nasty FG artefacts was indeed Flight Simulator - things like text overlays were getting somewhat scrambled and glitching.
I no longer remember which review video showed the artefacts though, and I guess with any luck tweaks to the game + drivers should eliminate this kind of issue... The fact that you didn't spot problems may in fact mean that they were already cured by the time you made the tests.

Neilski said:

Well, with the thread now around 10 months old, I find that I'm getting an itchy trigger finger, since a GTX 970 is not quite up to snuff in 2023.
In the last month or so, the 3060 Ti supply in the UK has finally dipped again below £400 (plenty of them available on Ebuyer at <= £399.99 for example), but with the passage of so much time I've become less sure that I want to upgrade to an 8 GB card ... (Also the damn thing still hasn't hit my notional target price of £350, but I guess I could stretch a point with inflation.)
This is making me consider (somewhat to my horror!) the 4070, despite it costing at least double what I'd regard as an acceptable price for a GPU (They start right now at £565 from the same vendor.)
It does have an even better power-consumption/fps and fps/price ratios than the 3060 Ti, even neglecting the DLSS3 & FG stuff which I won't trust to be useful until/unless I see it with my own eyes (nervous about artefacts having seen some nasties in reviews).
Throw in the sensible 8-pin power connector on many AIB cards, a sensible physical size, and it's basically just all great, bar the unlovely price.
In recent weeks I had pretty much ruled out any of the other 40 series cards being an option since the 4060/4050 were expected to have only 8 GB, but the bizarre news in the last 24 hours is that one of the 4060s will have 16 GB (wtf).

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If you're still considering the 3060 ti @ £399..., there's a 3070 selling for £413 on Amazon. It uses less energy than the 3060 ti. That said, given the current value of second hand Ampere cards, and the hullabaloo over 8gb vram cards recently, I'm not sure either card represents good value.

pattikins said:

If you're still considering the 3060 ti @ £399..., there's a 3070 selling for £413 on Amazon. It uses less energy than the 3060 ti. That said, given the current value of second hand Ampere cards, and the hullabaloo over 8gb vram cards recently, I'm not sure either card represents good value.

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Thanks, but am slightly confused because articles with both nominal and measured power consumption info for those cards seem to say that the 3070 has higher consumption than the 3060 ti.
I guess you probably mean that it uses less energy for a given set of graphics settings? (That would no doubt be correct given it's higher performance.)
Sadly though, the offer you found must have been short-lived - that link is currently showing a price of £740.

Neilski said:

Thanks, but am slightly confused because articles with both nominal and measured power consumption info for those cards seem to say that the 3070 has higher consumption than the 3060 ti.
I guess you probably mean that it uses less energy for a given set of graphics settings? (That would no doubt be correct given it's higher performance.)
Sadly though, the offer you found must have been short-lived - that link is currently showing a price of £740.

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If you're still looking @ the 3060 ti, Scan are selling the newer faster memory (Gddr6x) version for £369. However, depending on the type of games you like to play, there is a chance that the 3060 ti will be minimum spec.

So Nvidia is considering a new Titan GPU with up to 48Gb of VRAM mostly for professional use.

My 4090 will definitely hold me until the 50 series comes out.

ARE YOU INTENDING TO GET A 40 SERIES GPU​

My vote is in (literally!)



Sapphire Pulse 7900XT. Happy days!

Interesting..

So DDR7 should be able to outrun GPU cores for quite some time and use less power!
And he mentioned that Nvidia may be using this memory in the upcoming 50 series in 2024.

It's always great when they can squeeze more speed out of something and use less power!