Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Xtreme 24G Review: Quite possibly one of the best RTX 3090 graphics card

Note: This review was first published on 30 Nov 2020.

A Gi-normous graphics card

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 may be the card maker’s flagship gaming GPU but ironically, it’s also not its most powerful GPU. That honour goes to the GeForce RTX 3090, a GPU that caters to a select group of content creators and extremely hardcore gamers. But despite its eye-searing price tag (the Founders Edition version retails for US$1,499), GeForce RTX 3090 cards have been in extreme short supply and looks set to remain that way well into early 2021 – pandemic and economy slowdown be damn.

That also hasn't stopped NVIDIA's partners like Gigabyte from launching an ever-increasing stacks of RTX 30-series cards. Early-launched partners' cards have generally followed NVIDIA’s reference design, with performance usually in line with the company’s Founders Edition’s cards. Full custom cards that allows for better overclocking, RGB lightings, cooling wizardries, and in the case of Gigabyte’s new Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Xtreme 24G reviewed here, even comes with a customisable LCD screen.

Visually, the Aorus GeForce 3090 Xtreme 24G is one beast of a card and is, unsurprisingly Gigabyte’s top-tier card based on the RTX 3090 GPU. To cool the super-large copper base plate and eight heat pipes that sprawls across the length of the card, the card features what Gigabyte called a Max-Covered cooling that features two 115mm and one 100mm “Unique Blade” stack fans. These fans spin alternately from each other and Gigabyte claims this allows air pressure to completely cover the heatsink and therefore provides better heat dissipation.

The Aorus card uses some impressive high-end parts too, allowing it for extreme overclocking and a better overall lifespan. This includes a better power phase design that allows for the MOSFET to operate at a lower temperature, “Ultra Durable” certified chokes and capacitors, and a PCB coating that makes the card resistant to dust, moisture and corrosion.

A thin metal backplate covers the rear of the PCB, where there are standard cut-outs for airflow and also (very visible) thermal pads to help whisk heat away from the components on the flip side. It is worth noting that despite the heft and bulk of the card, Gigabyte did not provide a stand nor a stabiliser. Not that one is needed anyway, as the card did not show any sign of flex when installed onto my motherboard. That’s a big plus point.

The card’s bulk does have one drawback though – it occupies four full expansion card slots despite only needing two to be fastened to the casing. Also, Instead of NVIDIA's new 12-pin power connector used in the Founders Edition card, the Aorus’ uses more conventional triple 8-pin PCIe power connectors (good news for those who don't want additional cabling to deal with), and onboard LEDs that notify if the graphics power connectors are plugged in securely, or when experiencing any power supply abnormality in unfortunate circumstances.

There is also a dual BIOS switch on the PCB as well to let you switch between “Silent” and the default “OC” or Overclock modes. OC raises the default boost clock to 1860MHz (up from the default 1695MHz), which also happens to be the card’s default mode out of the box.

Gigabyte has been extravagantly generous with the display outputs on the Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Xtreme. There are three HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort outputs – you can’t use them all at once though, but the extra HDMI port accords you more flexibility in what set of outputs you can connect simultaneously. For instance, you could use three HDMI ports at one time (or three DisplayPort ports).

Now let’s check out the card’s performance.

Performance benchmarks

Apart from the RTX 3090 Founders Edition card from NVIDIA as well as MSI’s GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio 24G, the Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Xtreme 24G is only the third RTX 3090-based card to enter our lab. Additionally, I only had a limited time with the MSI card before having to return it, so I wasn't able to benchmark it with our latest suite of games. So, today’s comparison is pretty much Gigabyte’s flagship RTX 3090 up against the baseline RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. I’ll also be running a more limited selection this time as the results don't normally vary too much from one card to another. 

Since the Gigabyte’s card default mode is set to OC, I’ve used that when testing it against the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition. All things considered, the differences in clock speeds between the Aorus and Founders Edition models did show that there are some tangible differences in terms of real-world performance – in many of the games above the former always leading by an average 3-5fps. These might seem to be marginal gains at best, but it also seems to hint a little of the card’s overclocking potential, which can be activated further via Gigabyte’s Aorus Engine overclocking tool.

Temperature and Power comparisons

I measured both card’s temperature and board power using GPU-Z while running 20 loops of 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme Stress tests, and the results below are based on their peak loads. As we have seen the card’s performance edging the Founders Edition earlier, it’s no surprise to see the card running hotter – even if it’s just by a measly and impressive 1-degree Celsius. It does looks like the Aorus card’s larger and well-designed surface heatsink no doubt allowed for better thermal efficiency.

What I also thought was impressive is the less-than-expected bump in power draw as compared to NVIDIA’s card despite it being in OC mode. 34 Watts of extra power juice isn’t quite a lot, when you consider the additional RGB lights, fan and an LCD screen the Aorus card had to draw power for.

In short? This Aorus card has got not only a pretty good cooling system but also power management. It’s hard to say how Gigabyte did it without the right test and measuring equipment (and we won’t go there), but perhaps it’s a combination of a good circuit board design, well programmed BIOS, and high quality parts like capacitors and PCB.

In summary

With most partners cards that comes with conventional heatsink cooling systems, the difference in real-world performances against a reference card – in this case, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition – are usually marginal. So, let’s look at the Gigabyte card from the optics of a Founders Edition card user: it’s got better performance, arguably better overclocking potential, better temperature (by comparisons), RGB and a cool customisable LCD screen. Unless you love the unique design of the Founders Edition, which admittedly is a personal favourite of mine, there’s very little reason to not consider a partners’ RTX 3090 cards.

And the Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Xtreme 24G here should be a top consideration in your list.

The one big downer though, is the card’s equally bank-busting price tag of S$2,899. To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of about three and a half PlayStation 5 consoles. You do get a 4-year warranty though.

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