Overclocked GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition
In today’s review, we took the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition video card and overclocked it as high as we could. We tested 4K performance with and without DLSS and Ray Tracing to see where the strengths lie in its overclocking ability. You can read our full launch review of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition as well. The GeForce RTX 4090 FE has an MSRP of $1,599.99 and was launched in October of 2022.
Currently, the GeForce RTX 4090 FE is NVIDIA’s flagship GPU, and the Founders Edition built by NVIDIA. In our full review, and this one, we found the GeForce RTX 4090 FE to offer a huge performance benefit over the last generation of GPUs, and still reigns king even after the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX launch.
We used fresh drivers in today’s review, with all new fresh data, and the GeForce RTX 4090 FE is still at the top of its game. It’s as if you don’t even need to overclock it…but, we did anyway. The default TGP of this video card is 450W, and we pushed it much higher in our overclocking here today. We utilized all four of the 8-pin PCIe connectors on the adapter to allow plenty of power to push it to the max.
Overclocking Summary
The default GPU Boost on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is 2520MHz. We found that the actual real-world gaming frequency, thanks to NVIDIA GPU Boost dynamically clocks the Founders Edition up to 2745MHz while gaming, providing a 9% higher GPU clock frequency, just at stock settings thanks to this enormous cooling on the video card. We weren’t sure how much headroom was really left on the GPU, and our default board power hit 435W. Therefore, we made sure all four 8-pin PCIe connectors were connected and fired up EVGA Precision X1 software to overclock and set the fans to 100% for good measure.
With EVGA Precision X1 software we were delighted to see a high degree of power target we could apply to the Founders Edition, it actually kind of shocked us. We were able to apply a 33% power target increase, which is unusual for a video card, we typically do not see power delivery potential so high. This meant we had the opportunity to really push the GPU to its physical limits. We found that we could actually hit 3GHz (slightly above even) on this GPU. The unfortunate part is that it only lasted for about 3 minutes of gaming, and then it would crash. No amount of extra Voltage helped either, in fact, that would decrease the clock speed.
In the end, we found +220 on the GPU Clock to be the best setting in our overclocking attempts. This allowed a stable and consistent clock frequency, and no game crashing for long extended gameplay. The end result of our overclock was a consistent frequency of 2955MHz while gaming, very close to 3GHz. This brought the GPU frequency up another 7.6% in frequency. We were also able to overclock the memory very well, settling on 23.5GHz versus 21GHz default. This increased the memory bandwidth up to 1128GB/s.
All of this increased the total board power up to 490W in our testing, while gaming. Nearly 500W, we could see 500W being possible on AIB cards. That’s a pretty high power draw, but the good part about this power draw is that it tracked linearly with the performance increase. The power draw at default is quite efficient, and as you raise the power the performance goes up on a 1:1 ratio with it, so it isn’t out of line.
The other good part is the cooling, this cooling on the RTX 4090 Founders Edition is enormous, but it does an excellent job keeping the GPU cool while overclocked. You don’t have to ramp the fans up to 100% to achieve this overclock, which is good because the fans are super loud at 100%. This cooler does not hold back overclocking.
Final Points
Overall, overclocking the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition at 4K provided around a 5-9% performance improvement depending on the game. The game is what really matters here, in the more graphically demanding games, the percentage will be higher, around 9%, but the less demanding games, more CPU dependent, will be a bit under that. The GeForce RTX 4090 FE is already very fast in so many games at 4K, that you start to become more CPU dependent when you overclock it. The same is true even with Ray Tracing enabled, where we saw between a 6-9% performance improvement, with 9% being on the high side.
We actually thought we’d see a higher percentage increase with Ray Tracing, but this wasn’t the case, it was the same with or without. None of these performance increases actually helped create a new gameplay experience that wasn’t playable before, but it did help smooth out already playable experiences. We also saw performance increases with DLSS, but sometimes to a lesser degree, because it is upscaling from a lower resolution which is more CPU dependent. In fact, it may be the case that as new generations of CPUs are released, the percentage improvement via overclocking might actually increase over time, as newer and faster CPUs come out, like maybe the AMD Ryzen 7000 series X3D CPUs?
Overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is easy, but the real question to ask is if the performance advantage is really worth the much higher power demand. Overclocking really doesn’t change the performance scaling or profile of the video card. In fact, what does that more is DLSS upscaling technology. DLSS is what makes settings that are not playable at 4K, actually playable at 4K. It makes Ray Tracing playable at 4K in many graphically demanding games. DLSS adds more to the performance than overclocking does. The GeForce RTX 4090 FE is already a fast video card, to begin with, and overclocking doesn’t add much to the conversation for the power gain. DLSS actually does add performance and saves you power also.
Discussion (3 replies)
Join Discussion →Nice read. Thank you and job well done.
As always thanks! Can't wait to get home and try your settings.
I used some less aggressive settings with my Suprim Liquid X and had similar results but Afterburner only let me increase its power target by 110%. However, my core clock is only ~75 MHz lower (2860 to 2885) than this but the Suprim hybrid cooling solution keeps it cool and quiet (using stock fan curve and it rarely goes above 50% while keeping it in the 60s or lower. Power draw for me has mostly been in the 430s with occasional spikes just over 500W and not uncommon to even see it drop below 400. So far, the only game I've tested that kept it up there was RE3 where I cranked the IQ setting to 200%. It loaded the VRAM to 18GB and the power draw pinged 499-530W. FPS dropped to 50-55 but man it looks good. I did some testing with Metro Enhanced as well and it's so nice to finally be able to crank everything and turn off DLSS. I'm planning on doing another playthrough real soon. I did see it pull upwards of 500W at times but have only barely done some real-world play testing with it.
Well, I had a little time to experiment while dinner was cooking last night. I'm pretty sure I was hitting a power wall but I was mostly able to replicate this. I only spent maybe 20 minutes of testing but got to a seemingly stable point with +185 on the core and +1200 for mem which got me to 2940-2955 w/ occasional spikes to 2970 and mem at 11400.
The Suprim X only allows a +110 (even with X1). It was fun to see the upper limits of what this card can do but I doubt I'll use these as my gaming settings. The cooling solution was still amazing but with the stock fan settings I saw, interestingly, both the temp and fan usage go to 66-67 but at that point, it started to pull down the core clock to something like 2910. When I cranked fans to 100% temps dropped to 50-55c and the core was back to maxing. I've heard that in limited power situations it's a good idea to dial back the mem clock to free up power for the GPU hence why I had it at 1200 but I might take it back a little more just to see if it can reach 2970 more easily. However, I ran about 10 benches with Metro Exodus Enhanced, and a few with CB 2077, the same settings Brent used with mostly the same results but TBP was hanging 510-520W. My other overclock settings with core at 2860-2885 and mem at 11000 used less power and the stock fan curve was more than enough to keep it quiet too so I'll probably just stick with them. I figure I'm only losing out on maybe less than 1% of an OC gain while retaining all the benefits of why I wanted the Liquid X.
BTW I ran the SOTR benchmark and it was hilarious. At 4K, Q. DLSS, and everything but post processing stuff maxed, it ranged 185-250 FPS with some spikes upwards of 300 FPS. I still remember watching this game bringing a 2080 Ti to its knees. This a game you can play w/o DLSS at well over 60 FPS on a 4090 w/ smaa x2(maybe 4-can't remember the limit here) and looks great but it's just hilarious to see such FPS at 4K with almost everything else maxed.
On the note of a power wall, I came across this chart on TPU a couple of months back when researching this, and other cards. It could be useful for those wanting to tinker with their 4090s and wondering about power variants.
Just to add, that I was able to get mem to 11700 but at that point, I started to dial it back in favor of getting the core to max out.