Nvidia’s RTX 5090: A Liquid-Cooled King?
Nvidia’s RTX 5090 has rightfully claimed its place as the world’s fastest consumer graphics card, but is it truly king? MSI’s GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid pushes the boundaries of performance even further, leveraging liquid cooling to keep this beast cool and running at its peak.
MSI’s take on the RTX 5090 features a sleek design with a single fan over the GPU, but the real power lies in its 360mm radiator and three 120mm fans. This liquid-cooling solution, a step beyond the impressive air cooler found on the Founders Edition, allows the card to run cooler and potentially unlock greater performance.
Right out of the box, the MSI Suprim Liquid comes with a factory overclock, bumping the boost clock from 2,410MHz on the Founders Edition to 2,512MHz. While this initial boost provides noticeable gains, the potential for further overclocking makes this card a dream for enthusiasts.
Our initial overclocking tests involved carefully increasing GPU and GDDR7 memory clock speeds, ultimately pushing the GPU boost clock up to 2,662MHz and the GDDR7 memory from 14,001MHz to 16,001MHz.
Across synthetic benchmarks and AI tests, the overclocked MSI RTX 5090 showed promising results, often delivering a 10% performance increase over the Founders Edition. However, real-world gaming performance presented a more complex picture. Cyberpunk 2077 and Total War: Three Kingdoms provided contrasting results. While Cyberpunk showed consistent gains with the overclock, Total War experienced unexpected performance drops, potentially limited by CPU performance.
Despite the mixed overclocking performance, the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid consistently delivered superior thermals compared to air-cooled options, showcasing the true power of liquid cooling.
Ultimately, MSI’s Suprim Liquid solution proves that the RTX 5090 can reach incredible heights with effective cooling.
Whether pushing performance limits or simply enjoying silky-smooth gaming, the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid stands as a testament to NVIDIA’s commitment to pushing graphical boundaries.