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4090 Strix review - Beyond Fast with a few big hiccups

With RDNA 3 announcement approaching next week, I may as well get my review out of the way just in case there's a reason for me to return it and boy, idk if I'll ever buy another GPU at launch again after this experience lmao.

The goods:

The card is very well constructed. For $400 above MSRP for the Strix, one would hope so but seriously, it has a lot of aluminum front and back while most other ventors use a mix of plastic and metal. It's very fast reaching around 3.1Ghz depending on the workload which makes it above 100 Teraflops. It's very quiet and cool for a card that's able to draw 450 watts. More often than not, it's well below 60C with the fans barely spinning at 30% during heaviest of games. With a cooler of this size, you would hope so but it does make a big difference in noise between my Strix 3080 and my Strix 4090. You really do get the feeling the cooler was designed for something else entirely. I posted performance charts before but its easily more than double the performance of my Strix 3080 and my 5950x can bottleneck it in some games even at 4k.

The bads:

The 4090 was a lot of firsts for me. This is the first time I bought a Halo card. This is the first time I bought a card at launch. This is the first time I got a new GPU where I had to search to see if I could somehow install an older version of the driver cause of how buggy it was...

Lets talk about this 522 driver and my experience with my 4090. As a rule in PC, you should always uninstall your GPU driver via DDU before putting in a new GPU. So I did that and the first time I booted up my 4090, I got a black screen with my monitor saying no connection. I did a hard reboot and now got display. Alright fair enough... Then I installed the 522 driver. First day, no real issues. Did benchmarks and all that and it was fine. I shutdown my PC and then the issues started to appear on the next day. I ran 3dMark Speedway and after it finished, my display disconnected and I started hearing 4-5 disconnect sounds...

After about 2-3 minutes, I heard 4-5 reconnect sounds and my display came back. I checked event viewer and saw that a) The driver crashed and b) For some reason, all my SSDs disconnected. I was like...

And this is where the issues began, this behaviour happened when I exited overwatch or loaded up Forza Horizon 5 and started playing hotwheels dlc. Sometimes it even rebooted my computer byitself... It's like what the heck? Reinstalling the driver didn't do anything and since this is the only driver for my 4090, couldn't roll back either. After doing a lot of searching through a few days, I found the solution which was to set the GPU to prefer maximum performance in Nvidia control panel. Once I did that and rebooted, boom, no more driver problems but this shouldn't have even been a thing with such an expensive card. Especially one from Nvidia.

The second issue is the cable management. Since my Strix 4090 requires 4x 8 pin cables and it comes with such a bulky adapter, there really is no where for me to put the cables without an adapter. So it really looks like a jumbled mess. One would think Nvidia would find a better solution but alas.

Also the GPU mount the strix comes with is very shat. I bought a cheap rgb one from amazon instead which considering how cheap that is... Goes to show how cheap Asus is being by not including one of those instead.

Other thoughts:

One interesting note is that with my 3080, enabling HAGS and Rebar didn't do much but with my 4090, least in benchmarks like speedway, enabling both seems to give me a boost in FPS by around 5-7 fps. Considering speedway isn't easy to run, that's a pretty big boost. I'll be interested to see reviewers test this out.

Conclusion:

One would think that with Nvidia controlling a large part of the PCB, the power adapters the GPUs come with, the VBIOS the GPUs ship with and the driver stack that 4090 would be a flawless launch. Like how can a company goof up a launch where they control so many aspects of it? But apparently, Nvidia can... Newegg does have a 30 day return policy and while I am happy enough with my 4090 after getting its issues sorted, if AMD has something better, I am open to switching considering how many issues this launch has had.