Custom GeForce RTX 4090s and 4080s look crazy

Price isn’t the only thing surprising about the new Nvidia graphics cards. After the company announced the GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 at the GTC, its manufacturing partners (or at least the ones it left behind) showed off their custom designs based on Nvidia GPUs. And “excessive” doesn’t start to cover some of those graphics cards.

GamersNexus breaks down all manufacturing partner designs disclosed so far. Most are huge and power-hungry: base power consumption is 300 to 450 watts without overclocking, and heatsinks, heatpipes, and cooling fans on air-cooled models mean they take up 3 to 4 PCIe slots The space is on your motherboard. Rest in peace, small and powerful ITX gaming PC.

But this is just the beginning of the excess. The whole point of manufacturers customizing Nvidia graphics card designs is customization. It’s worth going through the entire Gamers Nexus video to see every cringe-worthy detail, and if just watching Steve lose it completely try reading some marketing copy directly.

Take the Tongde “GameRock OC” version of the 4090 as an example. The 3.5-wide, 329.4mm-long card features 80 metal headbands engraved with the branding and a fake crystal covering around the cooling fans. Naturally there are RGB lights underneath, giving your graphics card all the charm of a bassist on its second rehab trip of the year.

But this is just an aesthetic choice. The Galax isn’t much better, with its Anonymous hacker-inspired branded livery, but for the “Serious Gaming” version of the RTX 4080, the company decided three fans on the main cooler weren’t enough. It has an optional additional fourth fan on the card’s backplane – you might want to move it anywhere in the PC case above the first PCIe slot. And anything under it: The card has an optional “dark obelisk” support bar that holds up most of the card, and it comes with RGB lighting. Galax claims the Kubrickian stand can support 5kg and 11lbs.

Galaxy

Maybe it needs to. Because best of all, if your power supply can’t handle the new ATX 3.0 12+4 power rails, Galax’s cards will come with optional adapters. It distributes power needs among four 8-pin PCIe rails — yes, that’s 32 power pins, as many as the main power connections of modern high-end motherboards. Yes.

But all of this just adds bulk and brilliance to traditional cooler designs. The Gigabyte RTX 4090 Aorus Master card has “Bionic Shark” fans, some of which have flashing LEDs on the heatsinks. But wait, there’s more! The massive design includes a postage-stamp-sized LCD screen on the edge that displays statistics or animated GIFs through the PC’s glass-side-out. Yes, it comes with an “anti-sag bracket” because the whole thing is too heavy for your motherboard to handle on its own.

But the most ridiculous card prize of this marketing cycle may be thanks to the colorful Vulcan collection. Not only does it have a larger 800×216 LCD, it can also be magnetically repositioned depending on how you mount the card (parallel or perpendicular to the motherboard). But what if you don’t want to put a large gaming PC in order to read the internal temperature directly from the graphics card? Then just plug in the included USB screen dock and place a tiny extra screen on your desk.

Nvidia’s XX80 and XX90 series of graphics cards have always been designed for gamers looking for value over practicality. But between the price-defying price and the size of the shell, the next generation of GPUs is developing into absolute madness. Hopefully AMD and Intel will offer some less ostentatious, smaller, cheaper options in the near future – maybe Nvidia will sell an RTX 4070 that can fit in two PCIe slots at some point.

For more insights, be sure to check out our roundup of 6 important RTX 40 Series details you might have missed.

By Michael Clyde, Staff Writer

Michael is a former graphic designer who has been building and tweaking desktop computers longer than he likes to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction and salsa verde, in no particular order.