Introduction

ASUS Republic of Gamers Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum is designed to be the best graphics card you can buy. The GeForce RTX 4090 is already the fastest gaming graphics card in the market, but the ROG Matrix sets out to dial its out-of-the-box performance to levels that you'd normally expect from a new NVIDIA SKU such as the RTX 4090 Ti, if it ever came out. Who is this card for? It's for PC enthusiasts that want the best hardware, no matter the price. To overclockers, the card offers a binned RTX 4090 GPU, sitting on a top-notch PCB, with a strong VRM and advanced monitoring features. The power limit is also pretty high at 600 W, so they could take the card apart and get it under extreme cooling, to seek out top ranks in benchmarking and overclocking leaderboards.



ASUS reserves the ROG Matrix brand for only the fastest GPU each generation, and with the GeForce RTX 4090 having emerged as the leader, the company set out to design the fastest custom design there is. It begins with picking the highest quality 5 nm AD102 silicon that can provide the best possible boost clock residency and the best overclocking headroom. This is combined with the top bins of GDDR6X memory chips. Likewise, the VRM solution uses the highest current DrMOS that can run coolest at a given switching voltage, pair it with the most power limit we've seen on an RTX 4090, up to 600 W, to max out the specification of the 12VHPWR connector. Then on, it's over to ASUS's in-house overclockers to give the ROG Matrix the highest factory overclock for a production RTX 4090 to run out of the box. These are just one half of the puzzle, the other being cooling.

Keeping the ROG Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum cool is a factory-fitted, closed-loop liquid cooling solution. Its most striking aspect is that this is the first production graphics card to come with liquid metal TIM pre-applied from the factory. Liquid metal TIM offers the most effective thermal conductivity, but since it is a viscous (runny) fluid that's also electrically conductive, its application and transport are extremely difficult. Thankfully, ASUS has mastered an in-house technique of applying Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal TIM, which it originally developed for its ROG Strix Scar series gaming notebooks—a testament to just how stable and portable the TIM application is. The liquid cooler features a full-coverage copper water block, and a large 360 mm radiator, which ASUS says is more than capable to tame the RTX 4090 for the kind of factory overclock and tweaking headroom the card offers.

As for the GeForce RTX 4090 itself, it remains the fastest gaming GPU for this generation. Based on the latest GeForce Ada graphics architecture, the RTX 4090 is designed for maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD and beyond, including ray tracing. NVIDIA already has the 4K segment covered with the RTX 4080, so the top-spec SKU is for not just gaming, but also some serious creator work, taking advantage of the 24 GB video memory on offer, and NVIDIA GeForce Studio drivers.

The GeForce Ada graphics architecture debuts the 3rd generation of NVIDIA RTX real time ray tracing technology, faster and more capable CUDA cores that operate at higher frequencies; 3rd generation RT cores with even more hardware-accelerated capabilities, and 4th generation Tensor cores with support for even more math formats. The Optical Flow Accelerator component enables DLSS 3, a feature that generates entire alternate frames entirely using AI, without involving much of the graphics rendering machinery.

The RTX 4090 nearly maxes out the 5 nm AD102 silicon it is based on, enabling 128 out of 144 streaming multiprocessors present on the GPU, which works out to 16,384 CUDA cores, 128 RT cores, 512 Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 176 ROPs. The memory sub-system of the RTX 4090 is nearly carried over from the RTX 3090 Ti, you get 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across the chip's full 384-bit memory interface, working out to 1008 GB/s of memory bandwidth. With Ada, NVIDIA has placed greater architectural emphasis on significantly larger on-die caches. The RTX 4090 gets 72 MB of it.

The ASUS ROG Matrix RTX 4090 Platinum comes with the highest factory overclocked speeds of all RTX 4090 cards available; 2670 MHz boost, which is a 6% increase over the 2520 MHz reference speeds. While the RTX 4090 Founders Edition (de facto reference design) comes with a power limit of 450 W, ASUS has raised this to 500 W, which can be sent all the way up to 600 W via software. The memory speed is surprisingly left untouched at 21 Gbps. As we stated earlier, this is a halo product based on top of a halo product, something for a very small niche of enthusiasts; and so ASUS is pricing it at a whopping $3,200, an actual doubling of the $1,600 MSRP for the RTX 4090.

Short 5-Minute Video Overview

Our goal with these videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.

Packaging

The Card

The RTX 4090 Matrix has a very unique design theme that just looks amazing. Various shades of gray are combined with an acrylic window and subtle color differences. Everything is crafted from thick metal, which feels cold to the touch and has a perfect surface structure. To the untrained eye, this looks like an industrial design, not just a combination of front cooler and backplate, with a PCB sandwiched in-between. Very nice job, ASUS!


There is meticulous attention to detail, like the engraved "MATRIX" text.


On the front side you get more elements with a clean design language.


There's subtle RGB illumination zones inside the main cooler, on the radiator's fans and on the backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 28.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2079 g (without the radiator), the total weight including radiator is 3.6 kilos.


Installation requires three slots in your system. The card's width is 50 mm.


ASUS is including a dual BIOS feature with their card. You may enable the secondary "quiet" BIOS, which runs the fans at a more relaxed fan curve, for reduced noise levels. The placement of the switch a bit suboptimal, because it's recessed, which means you need to use a pen or other pointy object to reach the switch.


The radiator is a triple-fan 360 mm model, big enough to tame the heat output of the RTX 4090 GPU. Note how clean the wiring is, thanks to the fans having little pins on the sides, so they can be daisy-chained together easily, without any visible cables.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and two HDMI 2.1a.

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 4x PCIe 8-pin is included, you can also run the card with just three 8-pins.

Teardown

Disassembly of the Matrix is very difficult, and it's highly likely you will break it, unless you have some experience. The biggest problem is that the suction of the liquid metal and the thermal pads is very strong and that there is no wiggle room to make separation of main cooler and PCB easy. I ended up very carefully using plastic prying tools to not scratch or damage anything. Be patient, it will come apart eventually, it took me like 30 minutes. Once you know how it's done this process will go much faster of course.


The main cooler uses a large copper base and provides cooling for the GPU chip, memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The watercooling pump sits on the other side of the base plate, nicely integrated.


As mentioned before, instead of traditional thermal paste, ASUS is using Liquid Metal, which improves thermal transfer, but comes with a risk of short-circuits when not applied properly. That's why ASUS has devised a sort of cover mechanism that protects the GPU's capacitors from the metal paste. Do note the transparent plastic shim under the black tape in the second picture. If you're taking your card apart, you can also apply classic thermal paste after properly cleaning the GPU and heatsink. Your temperatures will end up 6 to 8°C higher than with Liquid Metal (I've tested it).


The backplate is made from thick metal and houses an RGB illumination element.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.


High-resolution versions are also available (front, back).