Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC graphics card is designed to be the fastest custom-design RTX 5090, which in turn is the flagship next-generation graphics card that the new GeForce Blackwell generation kicks the door open with. The SUPRIM brand of graphics cards from MSI represent the company’s highest tier of industrial design and thermal engineering. This line of cards are designed to go up against NVIDIA’s Founders Edition in design, and take on the custom design market to top spots in out of the box performance, factory overclock, cooler performance, and noise, all while looking like a piece of jewellery. We have not one but two RTX 5090 SUPRIM series graphics cards that we’re reviewing for you today, this one is the MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC, which comes with a factory-fitted closed-loop liquid cooling solution; while the other is the air-cooled MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM SOC. There are two sub-variants for each of the two, SOC and OC, we have with us the faster SOC (super overclock) edition.

The GeForce RTX 5090 and the Blackwell graphics architecture it’s based on, debut a fundamentally new chapter in real time 3D graphics, called neural rendering. By now you’ve experienced the awesome capability of generative AI to create photorealistic images and videos. NVIDIA and its allied researchers have created a way to combine objects that have been created in real time by a generative AI with conventional raster 3D graphics, much in the same way it figured out how to combine real time ray traced objects with raster 3D. This is done by creating a way for graphics applications to directly access Tensor cores, and the GPU having the ability to run 3D rendering and AI acceleration workloads in tandem, thanks to a new hardware scheduler NVIDIA calls the AI management processor.

The new Blackwell graphics architecture brings updates to all key areas of the GPU. The new generation CUDA cores present generational IPC uplifts, concurrent FP32 and INT32 execution capability on all cores in an SM, and introduce awareness for neural shaders, including an updated shader executing reordering that sends neural shader traffic to the Tensor cores. The new 5th Gen Tensor cores gain FP4 data format support for 32X the throughput over the original Tensor cores. The new 4th Gen RT core is ready for Mega Geometry, the ability for ray traced objects to have significantly higher poly counts thanks to the new Triangle Cluster Intersection engine, and Triangle Cluster Decompression engine. NVIDIA has also re-architected the power management engine of the GPU.

At the heart of the RTX 5090 is the new GB202 silicon. A surprising aspect of this generation is that it is built on the exact same foundry node as the RTX 40-series Ada. This would be the variant of the 5 nm EUV node that TSMC co-developed with NVIDIA, called the TSMC 4N. Whatever generational performance per Watt gains you see are hence entirely due to the newer graphics architecture and power management engine. The GB202 is a 750 mm² Goliath with over 92 billion transistors, and 192 streaming multiprocessors, a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface, and a 512-bit wide GDDR7 memory interface that nearly doubles the memory bandwidth over the previous generation.

The RTX 5090 is carved out of the GB202 by enabling 170 out of 192 SM, resulting in 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 Tensor cores, and 170 RT cores, across 11 GPCs, and this doesn’t even max out the GB202. The card comes with 32 GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory across a 512-bit wide memory bus, giving it 1.79 TB/s of memory bandwidth. You’ll see large increases in memory bandwidth across the board, since neural shaders, like pretty much all accelerated AI, are memory sensitive.

The MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC is more compact than even the RTX 5090 Founders Edition, because the card lugs a 360 mm radiator. The card is designed to look like jewellery, made with premium materials and machining. Under the hood, the GB202 is powered by a 29-phase VRM using the highest-grade chokes, controllers, and DrMOS available. The liquid cooling solution pulls heat from the GPU and the sixteen GDDR7 memory chips. The cold plate makes contact with an additional network of heatsinks that cool the VRM solution. A dedicated 100 mm MSI StormForce axial airflow fan ventilates this heatsink. MSI has given the SUPRIM Liquid SOC its highest factory overclock, with the GPU Boost going up to 2565 MHz (vs. 2407 MHz reference). These are the exact same clock speeds the air-cooled MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM SOC comes with, but the liquid cooling should provide better boost frequency residency, or lower noise. MSI is pricing the MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC at $2,500, a 25% premium over the already steep $2,000 starting price for the RTX 5090.