Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X is the company’s flagship air-cooled graphics card, based on NVIDIA’s new flagship GPU, the RTX 4090 “Ada Lovelace,” which we’ve extensively reviewed for you today across as many brands as we could get our hands on. The Suprim Liquid X builds on the short legacy of MSI’s refreshing new Suprim graphics card brand, which replaced the Lightning and Gaming Z brands at the top of MSI’s product stack. Slick, subtle styling, and rich materials are the new standard. Suprim is MSI’s attempt at outdoing NVIDIA’s Founders Edition in product design, without losing sight of MSI’s main objective—to be the fastest graphics card out of the box, with the highest headroom and features for enthusiasts. This review will tell you just how far MSI goes to meet this goal. We’re also reviewing the liquid-cooled sibling of this card, the RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is currently the most powerful GPU on the market, and the flagship of the RTX 40-series “Ada.” Leveraging the 4 nm EUV process, the new “Ada” graphics architecture more than triples the transistor-counts, to create newer fixed-function accelerators, more on-die cache, and a near-doubling in the SIMD machinery of the GPU over what the RTX 3090 comes with. The idea here is to offer a roughly 50% performance uplift over the RTX 3090, and a nearly 2x uplift over the RTX 3080 (which NVIDIA considered its previous-gen flagship).

The RTX 4090 is based on the 4 nm Ada AD102 silicon, with an incredible 76 billion transistor-count, triple that of its predecessor while actually being physically smaller; and fitting into the same power envelope, with 450 W typical board power. NVIDIA carved the RTX 4090 out of the AD102 silicon by enabling 128 out of 144 SM, or 16,384 out of 18,432 CUDA cores; 128 RT cores, 512 Tensor cores, 512 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The memory configuration is unchanged, with 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit wide bus. Besides making real time ray tracing have a much lower performance impact than enabling it did with the previous-generation; NVIDIA also introduced AI total frame-generation using DLSS 3, wherein unique frames are generated by AI, without involving the graphics rendering hardware.

The MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X uses a stunning-looking 4-slot cooling solution that’s made of premium multi-tone alloys, with a powerful aluminium fin-stack heatsink underneath. This is a conventional air-cooled solution unlike the Suprim Liquid X; and uses a trio of fans. MSI has given the card a healthy overclock of 2.62 GHz compared to 2.52 GHz reference, which interestingly is the same factory-OC as the liquid-cooled card. MSI is pricing this card at $1,700, a mere $100 premium over the $1600 NVIDIA baseline.