Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Henry Cavill explains why he’s waiting on the RTX 4090

Henry Cavill had a viral moment early in the pandemic when a video showing The Witcher and Man of Steel actor building his own gaming PC started making the rounds. Digital Trends recently sat down with Cavill to talk about his upcoming film Enola Holmes 2, as well as get a status update on his gaming rig — and the actor is eyeing some big upgrades in the near future.

In particular, Cavill is looking at the RTX 4090, but he hasn’t quite settled on Nvidia’s new GPU yet. “I’m also waiting for the AMD cards to come out to see what they’re like in comparison to the Nvidia RTX 4090 … time will tell with the specs,” Cavill said.

Henry Cavill lifting a gaming PC off a table.

AMD is set to announce its new graphics cards on November 3, and with reports of melting RTX 4090 connectors, it’s safe to assume Cavill isn’t alone in waiting on a GPU upgrade for now. Nvidia is also gearing up to release the RTX 4080 on November 16, which could end up being a sweet spot for high-end PC gamers.

Cavill’s CPU is up in the air at the moment, as well. “I think at the moment I’m probably going to go with the AMD chip still, but we’ll see,” he said. AMD recently released its Ryzen 7000 processors, including the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X, which it seems Cavill is looking at for the next era of his gaming rig. It’s not a straightforward upgrade, though.

On the upgrade, the actor said he “was slightly disappointed to learn I had to buy a new motherboard as well as everything else,” echoing a sentiment that many builders have felt with AMD’s most recent generation. Intel’s latest processors, including the Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K, support the same motherboard from the previous generation. And Ryzen 7000 represents the first time AMD has changed motherboard sockets in six years.

Although Cavill is still deciding the best components for a future PC upgrade, his rig hasn’t been waiting idly. “It’s still a top-end PC, but it’s all going to shift as soon as all the new gear comes in,” Cavil said. “I just bought a new PSU and that was a challenge, because it was a far larger PSU than the previous one. It’s a 1600 [watt], this one … Turns out I had to unplug every single cable and cord, because they needed to be both larger gauge and better cables, so it turned into a bit of a fiddle, but it was a nice warmup to the complete breakdown and reconstruction of my rig to come.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgrDLmasVxp/

The actor recently shared photos of him upgrading the all-in-one liquid cooler in his PC, as well, fit with some (properly colored) Noctua fans.

Hopefully, we’ll get another update on Cavill’s gaming PC once all the new hardware is out. For now, fans have Enola Holmes 2 to look forward to, as well as the long-awaited return of Cavill as the Man of Steel.

This piece includes original reporting by entertainment writer Rick Marshall. For more details, read his full interview with Henry Cavill.

Editors' Recommendations

Jacob Roach
Senior Staff Writer, Computing
Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…
Nvidia is ‘unlaunching’ the 12GB RTX 4080
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU.

Nvidia is "unlaunching" the 12GB RTX 4080. The company announced its plans through a blog post, and shared the following comment with Digital Trends: "We are unlaunching the RTX 4080 12GB. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing. You will not see it on Nov. 16."

The RTX 4080 was originally announced in 12GB and 16GB variants, which caused a lot of community backlash. With fewer cores and less power, the 12GB model felt more like a rebranded RTX 4070. Nvidia seems to agree now, but it hasn't said whether or not it will rebrand this model as the RTX 4070. The company also hasn't said if it will adjust the list price of $900.

Read more
The RTX 4090 has already sold for over twice its retail price on eBay
A hand holding the RTX 4090 GPU.

First there was the Van Halen concert that sold out in 18 minutes in 2004. Then there was the PlayStation 5. Now the GeForce RTX 4090 is the latest hot thing to get snatched up by scalpers and resold at exorbitant prices, sometimes as high as double its retail price.
No joke. This massive GPU was already the most expensive card ever, with a retail price of $1,599. It sold out the day Nvidia released it, of course, and then quickly began appearing on eBay for prices ranging from $2,500 to $4,250. People are actually paying these prices, too.

The majority of the RTX 4090 listings on eBay are closed within moments of getting posted. This is similar to what happened when the PS5 first released in November 2020. Scalpers bought up the units faster than Sony could ship them and began reselling them at insane markups.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is worth a pretty penny, there’s no doubt about it. It has a base clock speed of 2.23GHz and a boosted speed of 2.53GHz. It packs more than 16,000 CUDA cores and 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM. This is the crème de la crème of graphics cards, so serious gamers will definitely want to get their hands on it. But for over $4,000? 
Some of the lower-priced RTX 4090 cards on eBay were reasonably priced around $1,600. Be wary, however. It's possible that some are frauds or outright scams, which is something we saw often during the height of the GPU shortage. You don’t want to be the person who spent $1,600 on an RTX 3080 in a shiny plastic case.
All this was something we were hoping to avoid this time around, and we still have optimism that the market will settle back to normal quickly. Either way, it's best to wait it out until some of the hype around the launch dies down.

Read more
The RTX 4090 is already sold out. Here’s how you can still get one
A hand grabbing MSI's RTX 4090 Suprim X.

The RTX 4090 is the best graphics card you can buy right now -- just read our RTX 4090 review. And unfortunately, that means it's very popular. Across retailers, most (if not all at this point) RTX 4090 models are sold out.

But there's still a way to buy the RTX 4090.

Read more