What does a $2500 GPU get you? A look at MSI’s liquid-cooled RTX 5090

If you can afford a $2000 RTX 5090 graphics card — and you can find one — you can probably afford an even more expensive one. So why not go all out, with a liquid-cooled, AIO-sporting upgrade? Say hello to my not-so-little friend the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid. Adam and Will are checking it out on the latest PCWorld YouTube video.

Most OEM card designs are only subtly changing the original GPU spec, perhaps with a subtle overclock or an extra design or two. Not so here. The Suprim is a full liquid-cooled setup, complete with an accompanying 360mm radiator and and triple fans in an all-in-one configuration. It is, in a word, a beast. It’s also $2500, though again, it’s basically sold out everywhere. While the card itself is a little shorter since it can offload a lot of its cooling hardware, it’s a bit thicker than the sleek, two-slot Founder’s Edition.

Other features of the design include a brushed aluminum casing and a manual “silent/gaming” hardware switch and a bit of RGB bling. In a very cool touch (ha!), the power cables for the fans run up through the coolant line, so you only need to plug PSU power rails into the card itself…though it does need a whopping four of them plugged into the 12V-6×6 adapter. The fans can be replaced and powered with standard pins if you prefer a different brand.

Okay, so far, so expensive. But does this card actually perform better than the stock Founder’s Edition of the RTX 5090 card? And is it any cooler or quieter with that liquid cooling? Running it with a full suite of benchmarks, using the factory clock speeds, the MSI card got a tiny sliver of improvement in most of the tests — two or three percent at most. The most dramatic difference was on the Cyberpunk 2077 4K RT Overdrive test, it got 140 frames per second versus the Nvidia’s 130 frames. A 7.6 percent improvement. Of course, this beast can easily handle overclocking if you want to push frames even faster.

Foundry

Okay, but what about the noise and the heat? On a quick-and-dirty setup in a quiet recording studio, the AIO setup is notably quieter under load than the air-only stock card (especially with some added coil whine). The fans and pump are audible, sure, but it will be an significant difference in an enclosed PC case. Your CPU cooler — whether air or liquid — will probably overpower the Suprim’s noise. You might be able to get it even quieter with more premium fans.

And the cooling? Okay, it’s actually dramatically cooler. With an open bench under load with the Cyberpunk test, it showed 55-60 Celsius, compared to about 70 for the Nvidia card on the same test. Impressive. Most impressive. Though it should be pointed out that it’s drawing a bit more power than a standard card thanks to the extra fans and pump, 734 watts under load versus 712. Considering the monster power draw of the base card, not too much to worry about.

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