RTX 3090 – Hot Stuff!

Given the global shortage of silicon and the even greater shortage of GPU’s, we were extremely fortunate in purchasing two of these RTX 3090 GPU’s. The MSI Suprim X is reported to be the highest overclocked GPU’s out of the box, making it one of the fastest cards around. They are also enormous! They are so large that the manufacturer supplies each card with a steel stand to take the extra weight.

Having installed the card – and stand – in the workstation, the card was put through its paces with some GPU and real-time rendering. Although the cooling system in the GPU did a great job in keeping the temperatures down and preventing any thermal throttling, we hadn’t realised that the card vented sideways towards the glass panel on the workstation case. Although the panel was made from tempered glass, the build-up of heat caused the panel to crack in a number of places.

After replacing the cracked glass panel with a steel ‘bulletproof’ one, the tests continued. In the end we found that overall, our GPU render times had halved giving us a massive time saving when rendering animations on the GPU. But for us, the real benefit is using the 24GB of onboard RAM with real-time rendering applications. More detail, more objects and more effects can be thrown into these applications, helping to close the gap between real-time rendering and the higher quality of CPU rendering.