You can grab an RTX 3090 from CCL for £925, but there's a small catch
By the wire.
CCL Computers is currently offering an RTX 3090 - the rather sparkly Palit GameRock edition - for £925, as long as you're willing to jump through a small hoop to make use of a current £75 discount.
First of all, you'll notice that when clicking the link above, the card itself is actually £999, which is a bit of an annoyance. To obtain the discount, you'll need to add something else to your basket that's worth at least £1 (the best we could find was this red Patch cable for £1.06). Once you've added this to your basket, the total should be £1000.06. Then, head through to the checkout, and you'll be able to input the code SAVE75 in order to bring the GPU down to £925.06 (£924 excluding the cost of the cable).
Don't worry, I've followed along too, and this is the end result:
So, there you have it - a Palit RTX 3090 24GB GPU for £925. Now, to get into why this card's worth buying. In testing, the 3090 produced ~15 percent better performance than the RTX 3080 across all resolutions, including 4K. On that point, this is a card designed for those who want to eke out as much performance from their system at a much lower cost than the RTX 3090 Ti. That card aside, this is the current Nvidia flagship, and is set to be until the RTX 4090 arrives (which is looking to be further away given the recently rumoured delays).
What's special about the RTX 3090, including this Palit version, is that it's got 24GB of usable memory. While this may not be more than a showpiece for gaming performance at the moment, it's more useful to those with powerful editing rigs for use in programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Digital Foundry's resident Lord and Saviour Richard Leadbetter utilises a 24GB GPU for video editing, and it regularly overcomes the powerful effects and transitions that 8 and 12GB GPUs simply can't deal with. The RTX 3090 almost therefore blurs the line between consumer and pro-grade cards, and gives creatives another option to lump into their workstations for max power.
As well as offering ridiculous levels of usable RAM, this is also marketed as an 8K gaming card, which, with HDMI 2.1 support, allows you to run that resolution natively at 60Hz, if it's max detail you're after. Of course, there isn't much in the way of 8K content at the moment, but running the RTX 3090 with DSR enabled and downscaling the internal rendering from 8K to a native 4K display (like the large Gigabyte FO48U OLED monitor I talked about yesterday) will give you some sense of the card's true power. Games such as Dirt Rally ran consistently well at 8K 60fps in our testing, while the likes of Doom Eternal on ultra varied between 45 and 60fps. It's definitely possible to indulge in some 8K gaming with the 3090, even if it's not something most of us can afford yet.
The RTX 3090 may not be the outright fastest graphics card in the here and now, but it remains an excellent performer and provides a ton of extra value for video editors and others that can make use of its high VRAM allocation. This is the best price we've seen on the card for some time, and if the GPU fits your build this is well worth picking up.