Nvidia RTX 40 Series partner models wield extreme cooling and flair aplenty

pcinvasion.com:

Nvidia announced the potent RTX 40 Series at its GTC event on September 20. Unsurprisingly, the RTX 4090, 4080 16GB, and 4080 12GB Founder’s Edition models received the limelight during the event. It’s of no surprise that Nvidia’s AIB (add-in board) partners followed closely behind with reveals of custom RTX 40 Series models featuring massive cooler designs, overclocked performance, and blinged out looks.

You’ll be able to get an RTX 40 Series graphics card partner model from most of the usual manufacturers. The list includes ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, PNY, Zotac, Colorful, Inno3D, Palit, Galax, Yeston, and Gainward to name the major players. You’ll notice EVGA is absent from the list, and that’s because it announced an exit from the graphics card market just last week.

The available designs from pretty much all of the partners look really sleek this time around. Gone are those cheap plastic designs from the early 2010s. It’s good to see you’ll get something worth showing off for the enormous MSRPs you’ll need to deal with.

As a reminder, the RTX 4090 starts at $1,599 USD, the RTX 4080 16 GB starts at $1,199 USD, and the RTX 4080 12 GB starts at $899. Those are some big increases from the previous generation, so we hope it accounts for the AIB markups seen with the RTX 30 Series. MSRP should be a realistic price and not exist for marketing purposes. As of now, no partner pricing has been announced.

We still don’t know any pricing for partner models, but you can expect the usual tier structure from each brand. There are some more plain models, but most of these designs do look pretty high end. We’ve rounded up some pictures and details of the unique designs to give you a general idea of what you can get from the RTX 40 Series.