Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 is the undisputed most powerful consumer graphics card, but 5090 is the best one? In terms of value, the answer is the cheapest one you can find – probably the Founders Edition at a steep $2000 – but what if you’re willing to spend even more and want absolutely top-tier performance?
In that lucky scenario, MSI puts forward the water-cooled RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC. With a nominal price of $2500, it’s (at least) 25 percent above MSRP, so how much extra performance do you unlock out of the box with this ultra-premium offering? Are there are any additional benefits in terms of thermals, noise and overclocking potential? And what is it like building a PC with an extra 360mm radiator to deal with?
To find out, we’ve run the Suprim Liquid through a portion of our usual battery of gaming benchmarks, looking at RT and raster performance across a range of resolutions in the most demanding scenes from recent games. We’ve tested with the default “silent” profile and the higher-clocked “gaming” profile, and compared these results with that of the original 5090 Founders Edition. We’ve also got some overclocked results for comparison, featuring a small core clock boost and a more sizeable bump to memory bandwidth, on the penultimate page.
Before we get into the benchmark results, let’s cover off the physical design of the card itself and our performance expectations based on its specs.
Unlike the surprisingly compact Founders Edition card, the Suprim Liquid is a bit of a beast – though this is mostly down to the fact that it comes with a 360mm radiator permanently attached by two 450mm tubes. The GPU itself is a dual-slot design like the FE, making it relatively easy to install, but at 280x148x51mm it’s still sizeable – and of course having that 360mm radiator, measuring 394x121x55mm, means that pretty much all SFF cases won’t be sufficient. The card itself weighs just under 3.0kg, while the whole package is just under 4.3kg – quite substantial.