Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 5090 SUPRIM SOC is the company’s most premium air-cooled custom design graphics card based on the new RTX 5090 Blackwell, the flagship RTX 50-series GPU, designed to not just max all current and upcoming games at 4K Ultra HD, but also unlock new experiences never before imagined, such as 8K 60 Hz or even 120 Hz. Today we are also reviewing this card’s liquid-cooled sister, the MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC, so be sure to check out that review after this one, to see which cooling option is more practical for you. The SUPRIM line of graphics cards are a rather recent addition to MSI’s graphics card product stack, introduced with the RTX 30-series. These cards represent the pinnacle of MSI’s product design. The company is looking to meet or exceed the form and function combination standards set by NVIDIA’s first-party Founders Edition graphics card, while also having superior cooling performance, noise, and a much higher factory overclock to boot. There are actually two variants of the air-cooled RTX 5090 SUPRIM, the OC and SOC (super overclock), both of which are clocked higher than MSI’s other custom RTX 5090 models. We are reviewing the SOC today.

The GeForce RTX 5090 heralds NVIDIA’s new GeForce Blackwell graphics architecture, and with it, a major industry standard addition to the way real time graphics is rendered, called Neural Rendering. You’ve probably already been blown away by generative AI, and its ability to conjure up photorealistic images and video. NVIDIA and its allied researchers have invented a way to bring generative AI models closer to the graphics rendering pipeline, making the AI create portions of a 3D scene. This is enabled by a new API-level access to the Tensor cores of the GPU, and the introduction of a new on-chip AI acceleration resource management component called AMP. This is different from DLSS, where AI is used to reconstruct details in an upscaled frame. Blackwell also introduces DLSS 4, which introduces new transformer-based AI models to all the subcomponents (super resolution, frame generation, etc.), and introduces Multi Frame Generation, the ability for an AI model to create not just every other frame, but up to three succeeding frames to a traditionally rendered frame, without any of the blur, latency, or other optical artifacts expected of such a technique. Multi Frame Generation makes it possible to play today’s games at 8K with 60 Hz, if you have such a TV or a display, or even high refresh-rate gameplay at 4K.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Blackwell is that unlike every new graphics architecture from NVIDIA in the past decade, it does not introduce a new foundry node. That’s right, the RTX 5090 is built on the same NVIDIA co-engineered variant of the 5 nm EUV from TSMC, called simply the TSMC 4N—the exact same node on which the RTX 40-series Ada generation of GPUs is built on. And yet, the company promises generational gains in performance-per-Watt. This is thanks entirely to the performance of the new architecture, paired with a completely re-architected power management solution that we’ll talk about in the next page.

The RTX 5090 is a no-holds-barred flagship product, and is based on the largest GPU from the family, codenamed GB202. This is the first gaming GPU to introduce a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface, and the new GDDR7 memory standard that doubles speeds over the GDDR6. The RTX 5090 comes with a mammoth 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. The GPU needs this kind of memory bandwidth to pull off neural rendering, and you’ll find massive increases in memory bandwidth to be a common trend across all upcoming RTX 50-series GPUs, thanks to GDDR7.

The MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM SOC is designed to resemble jewellery, its cooling solution is made of the most premium materials, machined to perfection. The card debuts MSI’s new Hyper Frozr SUPRIM cooling solution, featuring a sturdy outer frame that suspends the rest of the card. A large vapor chamber baseplate pulls heat from the GB202 ASIC, and the sixteen GDDR7 memory chips, conveying it to an arrangement of seven heat pipes that are flattened and bunched up over this vapor chamber. The heatsink is ventilated by three of MSI’s latest StormForce axial airflow fans, which aren’t just webbed toward the edges, but also feature serrations. There is a tastefully executed ARGB LED lighting setup, and the highlight of MSI’s original design has to be its 3-D backplate, which gives the card an industrial look when installed. Lastly, the card comes with MSI’s highest factory overclock for the RTX 5090, with the GPU boosting up to 2565 MHz (vs. 2407 MHz reference). This may not seem like much, but the whole point of this nearly 4-pound cooling solution is to ensure the GPU holds onto boost frequencies better, by keeping temperatures lower. MSI is asking $2,400 for this card, which is a stiff 20% premium over the baseline price.