Zotac has launched a new flagship graphics card called the GeForce RTX 4090 PGF OC. The company teased the launch event earlier this week, choosing today to coincide with the 16th anniversary of the Zotac brand. In addition to, official announcement Pickthru from Zotac, China’s IT home I managed to write a rough review of the first day (both links open the site in Chinese). But before we go any further, we have to ask if Zotac deliberately designed this card to look like a sneaker.
First, let’s take a look at the main features of the Zotac RTX 4090 PGF OC. You may have heard of the Zotac PGF series before, as they are the “Prime Gamer Force” products that represent the pinnacle of the company’s offerings. Zotac said in a press release that the new PGF, a “proprietary design language”, was designed in collaboration with the Morale Group. That said, this Zotac RTX 4090 PGF OC of his clearly shares a lot of the same curves found in the company’s Amp Extreme AIRO model, but overall it’s more of a sneaker. I have a feeling that It in no way represents “minimalism” as Zotac marketers claim.
The Zotac PGF’s design is not without its appeal. A mostly white curved cooling shroud, matching backplate and four of his RGB LED lighting zones could work well with the right build. On the topic of construction, Zotac states that this PGF card features a “new and upgraded high-efficiency Ice-core VC cooling system.” Cooling is essential for stable RTX 4090 performance, so triple 110mm fans (double ball bearing design), large contact plates, “ice vein heat pipes”, high-density nickel-plated fins, and high-convection design. Later, we’ll delve into the ITHome review for evidence of the quality of this cooler.
You should expect dual BIOS on such a flagship card, and Zotac offers a default BIOS GPU clock setting of 2,580 MHz and 2,625 MHz in extreme speed mode. The default clocks are only marginally better than the reference, and for some perspective check out our review of the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card.
As the ultimate flagship, users should expect these cards to be well overclockable, and Zotac is ready for it. In addition to the advanced coolers outlined above, we haven’t even mentioned the size of this product yet. At 381 x 154 x 74mm, it’s the largest RTX 4090 we’ve seen, 77mm longer than the Founders Edition and 23mm longer than the chunky Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC. Another info nugget of interest to overclockers is that the PGF features a 24+4 phase power supply design and the only review stated that OC’s efforts to push power beyond 500W shouldn’t cause any problems. I’m here.
Without jumping into the ITHome review of this new flagship Zotac graphics card with a very standard custom-designed clock, here’s how the GeForce RTX 4090 performs in games and applications. The GeForce RTX 4090 is one of the best graphics cards available in 2023. However, we looked at the data to see information about how well the custom coolers hold up in terms of temperature and noise. These are the things that might set the Zotac RTX 4090 PGF OC apart.
ITHome was impressed with the temperatures measured using the Zotac PGF card under load. The core temperature of the card is stated to stabilize at around 67.8°C (which consumes 450 W) and the VRAM stabilized at 76.6°C. Moreover, comprehensive tests showed that the card behaves very stably even under sustained load. Those are decent numbers, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any evidence that ITHome tested the noise level of this card. His latest Zotac card is tom’s hardware The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti — Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Edition in the lab (which we looked at just four days ago) offered moderate noise performance for its class. Plus, ITHome’s reviewer seemed pretty happy with the PGF, so you wouldn’t expect any nasty, loud surprises with this new flagship.
Zotac certainly looks like they’re asking a premium for their new RTX 4090 PGF OC cards. In China, it trades at 16,999 yuan, equivalent to about $2,385 today.
