The Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity offers up the RTX 3090 at the $1499 MSRP and does so within a reasonably nice package and coming in a bit thinner than the Founders Edition. While the Founders Edition is quite wide and 3 full slots while weighing in at 2211g the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity comes in at the typical video card width and under 3 slots filling the 2.5 slot mark and weighing almost half at 1342g.
The card features a triple fan design with 90mm fans in a row atop a large aluminum heatsink. Surrounded by a plastic shroud I can’t help but feel like the price of the card alone could demand it to be made of metal.
The back of the card features a full-length aluminum backplate with ventilation along the way including a fair bit at the end where the backplate and heatsink overhang the length of the reference designed board used. The Zotac Gaming logo on the back features full RGB controllable through the Firestorm software.
The sides of the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity showcase wide gaps to allow heat to escape from the shrouded heatsink. the outward (when installed in typical fashion) side of the cooler displays the Zotac Gaming logo with brilliant addressable RGB lighting.
The rear I/O of the card features 3x DisplayPort connections and a single HDMI 2.1 connection. The side also reveals the simple and normal 2×8-pin PCIe connectors that are inverted for ease of access.
When looking at the side profile of the cooler you can see that the heatsink is dense yet spaced out enough so that the air can easily escape. There is a support brace that runs along the bottom that doubles as the heatsink for the VRMs so that the VRM and the Core/Memory cooling components are separate as to not interfere with each other.
When stripped down completely we can see the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity is built around the reference board design with a few tweaks to allow for RGB and multiple fan headers. The PCB is surprisingly small for such a large GPU core and 24GB of VRAM.
The cooler is comprised of 7 heatpipes run along with a densely populated heatsink. The CPU and Memory by the entire heatsink with the memory cooling connected to the nickel-plated copper base plate.
If I were to say that the rear GPU capacitors weren’t a point of contention for people these days then I’d be lying, but they are and the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity utilizes and full 6 SP-Cap design. While there are reports of issues with this I did not come across stability issues throughout my testing. Zotac did have this to say on the subject:
We would like to reassure our customers who either have a ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics card on hand or have placed an order in your local retailer or etailer to continue having confidence in us and our products. Our graphics cards have undergone stringent testing and quality controls in design and manufacturing to ensure safety and great performance. At ZOTAC, product quality and your satisfaction are always very important to us.
-ZOTAC
RGB is all the rage, or so I’m told, so we have to give you an idea of how the card looks all lit up.
Zotac has released their latest revision of their Firestorm software for controlling the clock speeds and RGB lighting controls. I have to give the card credit because if you don’t like RGB and want to get rid of it here as you can disable it and remove the software as the card will store the settings!
The Firestorm software does feature the OC Scanner but since the card is limited to the 100% power limit already you’ll not likely find any overclocking headroom as I did with this card.
