Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU hits jaw-dropping 3.8GHz overclock to break a bunch of records

Team OGS Galax RTX 4090 HOF overclocked
(Image credit: Team OGS / HWBOT / Galax)

Nvidia’s RTX 4090 has been overclocked to new heights, breaking a bunch of world records as a result.

This is the Galax RTX 4090 HOF – that’s a ‘Hall of Fame’ edition graphics card, specifically designed to be pushed very hard by expert overclockers – with Team OGS managing to reach a staggering 3.825GHz.

As Wccftech reports, the overclocking attempts, which used liquid nitrogen cooling as you might guess, led OGS to claim no fewer than 14 world records, including a bunch of new 3DMark highs (Fire Strike Ultra and Fire Strike Extreme, and Port Royal among others).

Team OGS had previously pushed this Galax RTX 4090 to 3.705GHz, so this is a considerable step on for the overclocking outfit from Greece.


Analysis: Still early days for the RTX 4090

The Galax RTX 4090 HOF certainly is quite a piece of kit, coming with twin 16-pin power adapters that enable the GPU to be driven with 1000W, no less. With Team OGS moving from 3.7GHz to well over 3.8GHz in this latest round of overclocking, we can expect further speedier overclocks down the line – remember, it’s still very much early days for the RTX 4090 and its record-breaking antics.

With no rival from EVGA (Kingpin model of the RTX 4090), as that card maker has parted ways with Nvidia, it looks like the Galax HOF will be the one to watch for records going forward, that much is for sure.

Note that the HOF cards aren’t made for consumers to buy, but are specifically targeted at overclockers who use exotic cooling – these are limited edition and seriously pricey graphics cards, in other words.

That said, even vanilla RTX 4090 models offer plenty of performance as we’ve seen, and certainly represent a better deal in terms of price/performance than the thin-on-the-ground RTX 4080 – the latter has definitely been a disappointment in terms of its relative value proposition. It’s not that the RTX 4090 is good value as such – it’s still very steeply priced – but that fact that the RTX 4080 makes it look relatively good is surely a worry.

Maybe that situation with RTX 4080 pricing will change when RDNA 3 GPUs emerge with their (somewhat) cheaper price tags; we can but hope.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).