First; I didn't rate "Value For Money" because of the state of the market these days. Carl Menger and the Austrian School taught me well. I'm in a spot of work where a 4090 is what's called for right away and that imperative drove the buy. The shopping began on that premise.
Watching the market closely for several months now, I observed all the fans at work, cheering their GPU AIB favorites and slagging all the rest. I saw more than enough legitimate customer complaints to go around among all the manufacturers, to the point where, honestly; price wasn't the only compelling factor, but certainly the leading one. At buy-time, the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO 24GB was quickly and conclusively the pro move.
Complaints about style are what they are and everyone has 'em. Personally, I like it. I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968 and the computing power idealized in that film is now more than real, and more so all the time. I like the celebration with 5-zone RGB control on this board. "It's really space-age. I dig the fins." (Frank Zappa)
Installation went straight ahead, with the 12vhpwr cable from my power supply. It lit right up first try on the Gigabyte B660 DS3H AC DDR4 motherboard. I had downloaded the latest driver .zip from NVIDIA before the install, and that went completely as-advertised. Smooth update to 546.17, no goofs.
This was an upgrade from a PNY RTX 3060 in a 32gb RAM Windows 11 system. That 3060 worked hard through the initial phases of the project, and the 4090 is in command now for all the right reasons.
* Vectorworks Spotlight -- stage lighting plot & control design; 3D geometry import/export
* Blender -- 3D geometry management (+import/export); stage set design
* GrandMA3 on PC -- desktop emulation of real-world control console; preproduction design/cueing
* Unreal Engine -- packaging client presentations for design review
(see attached images)
These central applications vary in their exploitations of what this Zotac 24gb RTX 4090 can do. Cycles ray-tracing in Blender is just smashing. It depends on scene complexity, of course, but this is power unprecedented by far in my nearly 40 years of computing. Visualizing stage looks in GrandMA3 is weightless in all viewing (zoom, orbit, pan, etc.) and real-time authoritative at the faders. I cannot yet estimate the top-end of performance in Unreal Engine at this. There is imperative work to do that precludes comprehensive testing (I haven't even glanced at DaVinci Resolve yet), but that's just fine: it's doing everything I need to do, so far, easily.
~~~
The sale went smoothly, and this unit was delivered almost a full week *ahead* of stated schedule. Go figure that.
All in all, this integration of the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO 24GB with my upgraded iBuyPower Trace Mesh rig (yes; it fits in the IBP Trace 7 case) is everything I would look for in a $2000+ deal on a flippin' GPU.
It's a worker, and that's what counts.
| Memory Speed | 21 GHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 24 GB |
