Our fifth custom RTX 4090 card to date continues our coverage with the Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC. For information on the other cards, see the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC, MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X, and Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC. We’ll have the performance numbers in our charts, though. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT launch is now in the past, making it apparent that the RTX 4090 will continue to be the greatest graphics card and the top performance in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy for a considerable amount of time.

The 4090 Vulcan OC from Colorful follows a trend that is well known by this point: you get a large air cooler and triple fans with a form factor that is wider than triple-slot. But Colorful doesn’t stop there; it also has a removable LED panel that can be used to display additional RGB effects or information like temps and clock rates if that’s what you’re looking. Additionally, the card is supported by a stand to avoid sagging.

The controversy around the melting 16-pin adapters has died down two months after the initial introduction, with Nvidia blaming incorrectly connected connections. Since there haven’t been many recent complaints of melted connections, we may assume that news has spread and that human mistake was actually the underlying culprit. Nvidia would undoubtedly prefer to put melt-gate behind them, especially as it seems to have plans to use the same 16-pin connection for the majority of its RTX 40-series product line.

Graphics Card Colorful RTX 4090 Vulcan OC Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition
Architecture AD102 AD102 AD102 AD102 AD102
SMs 128 128 128 128 128
GPU Shaders 16384 16384 16384 16384 16384
Boost Clock (MHz) 2625 (OC mode) 2640 (OC mode) 2535 2625 2520
VRAM Speed (Gbps) 21 21 21 21 21
VRAM (GB) 24 24 24 24 24
TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) 86 86.5 83.1 86 82.6
TFLOPS FP16 (FP8) 688 (1376) 692 (1384) 665 (1329) 688 (1376) 661 (1321)
Bandwidth (GBps) 1008 1008 1008 1008 1008
TDP (watts) 515 (OC) 480 (OC mode) 450 480 450
Dimensions 336x134x68.5mm 358x149x70mm 340x143x74mm Card: 280x139x42mm 304x137x61mm
Radiator: 275x117x54mm
Weight 2433g 2508g 1990g 2336g 2186g
Official MSRP $1,769 $1,999 $1,699 $1,749 $1,599

The sole variation between the different RTX 4090 cards in terms of specs is their boost clocks. Even then, there isn’t much of a gap because boost clocks are often conservative. About 2.7 to 2.75 GHz was delivered by the Founders Edition, while some third-party cards may have delivered speeds up to 50 MHz higher. The difference is typically less than 2%, however occasionally greater power limitations might slightly widen the discrepancy.

Instead of the typical switch we find on other cards, Colorful has an OC button on the IO panel. If the side of your PC is closed and you frequently switch modes, it could be helpful. However, because a reboot is necessary, we anticipate that most users will just push the button—or not—and go on. Reference clocks result if you don’t push the “1-button OC,” albeit I’m not sure whether the power restriction increases.

Only the Asus model has a higher starting price than Colorful’s official MSRP, which is a little bit higher than most of the other cards. Currently, it doesn’t really matter in practice as all of the RTX 4090 cards we’ve recently seen online retail for more over $2,000 each. That is if you can even locate the Colorful card in the United States. In comparison to some of the other graphics card brands, it has a relatively limited U.S. presence while being a well-known brand internationally.