How Fast Can a Liquid-Cooled GeForce RTX 5090 Card Run? We Tested to Find Out

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Little doubt, at this point: Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 will be the world’s fastest consumer graphics card when it goes on sale later this week. The fastest card prior to this (discounting workstation-grade options like AMD Radeon Pros and Nvidia RTX A-series "Ada" cards) was the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. As our early tests showed, the RTX 5090 is clearly a step above. But why stop there, if you can run an RTX 5090 faster still?

PC Labs received directly from Taiwan a sample of MSI’s $2,499-MSRP GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC, a water-cooled variant of Nvidia’s new flagship GPU. We spent an afternoon's time pushing the card hard. (We would have liked to spend longer, but we're also in the midst of re-testing stacks of competitive cards for the upcoming RTX 5080 launch, so time is tight!) The early returns: Yes, going even faster than Nvidia's RTX 5090 Founders Edition is certainly possible. We ran a subset of our tests on this supreme Suprim card, then did a bit of overclocking via MSI's Afterburner app to see how much extra performance we could safely squeeze out. We juiced out some; more is likely possible for the daring.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid: Cooling Supremacy

Nvidia’s thermal solution for its GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is an exceptional piece of engineering, with a rather large twin-fan air cooler compressed into a dual-slot enclosure. But facts are facts, and water, or the enhanced cooling fluid used inside of liquid coolers, is simply a better cooling medium than air. The card has a sleek, premium metallic exterior and a single fan set over the GPU proper for some degree of air-cooling the GPU heat-sink apparatus and the region around it. But most of the cooling prowess comes from the separate, large 360mm radiator and the three 120mm fans on the radiator itself. Not only does this mean a lot more cooling potential, but it can also help to vent hot air from the GPU out of the case from a second location, which will also be beneficial to keeping your system cool overall.

In addition to looking spiffy and keeping the GPU chip proper at a cooler temperature, the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid also comes out of the box with a factory overclock that helps boost its performance without any tweaking. The stock Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 operates with a 2,010MHz base clock, and it can hit a peak boost clock of 2,410MHz. MSI didn’t adjust the base clock much, as that doesn’t have much effect on performance. (The as-delivered Suprim Liquid has a base GPU clock of 2,017MHz.) Its boost clock, though, comes kicked up by 4%, to 2,512MHz.

This, along with the better cooling to help maintain the elevated boost clocks for a longer time, helps to give MSI’s RTX 5090 slightly better performance. But we were sure it could go further. (After all, 360mm radiator!)

A Quick Excursion Into Overclocking

Overclocking a GPU, if you look at the typical steps, is relatively easy to do from a process point of view. But it can be risky if not done carefully.

The main hazards are in adjusting the power settings. Pushing more juice, measured in increased voltage, can damage various parts of the circuitry and either shorten the life of the parts involved, or, if you go too far too fast, kill something right off. We have additional plans for our MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid (doing a full review of the card; not killing it), so we opted for a safer course while overclocking and left the voltage alone altogether for this quick trial. Not messing with the voltage limits how far you can overclock, but it also minimizes the risk.

Without toying with the stock voltage, we were able to push up our GPU boost clock speed by 150MHz, to 2,662MHz. That represents a 6% increase over the already-overclocked stock settings set by MSI, and a 10% boost over Nvidia’s reference boost clock. We had even more luck with the GDDR7 memory, which we were able to push from 14,001MHz (as shown in GPU-Z) to 16,001MHz, for a 14% overclock and an increase of almost 2GHz.

These increases are relatively mild, but they could still result in some measurable improvements. (A percentage of overclocking, after all, doesn't necessarily translate into 1:1 performance gains.) Let’s take a look at how this played out in a subset of our benchmark tests.

Synthetic and AI Benchmarks

Starting with UL 3DMark's Port Royal and Steel Nomad, we didn’t see much in the way of a performance increase from the MSI version of the RTX 5090 (or from the overclock we performed) over the standard GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition. UL 3DMark's Nvidia-specific DLSS Feature Test scores, however, showed results that were roughly in line with the clock-speed increase, with the overclocked MSI graphics card running 10% faster than the Founders Edition.

We then ran a local-LLM AI processing test (UL's Procyon AI Text Generation test), which uses several popular LLMs of the moment. The test scores produced by Procyon also didn’t respond strongly to the changes in clock speed. Though the MSI Suprim Liquid version of the RTX 5090, with or without the overclock, showed some minor gains over the Founders Edition RTX 5090, the difference was relatively small. That was also the case for the PugetBench benchmark that we ran inside of Adobe’s Premiere Pro, measuring rendering, video-file manipulation, and other typical Premiere actions.

We then moved on to our test renders in Blender. Blender’s test scores differed from Procyon AI and Adobe Premiere Pro, and showed a 10% increase in performance for the overclocked RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition. Here, our manual overclock of the liquid card appears to have helped, as the stock-settings MSI card was just 3% ahead of the Founders Edition card in Blender.

We saw a similar difference in the RTX version of our V-Ray 6 test, which also showed the overclocked MSI RTX 5090 10% ahead of the Founders Edition, while the stock MSI RTX 5090 was essentially tied with the RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

Games! Cyberpunk 2077 and Total War: Three Kingdoms

The synthetic tests (like the 3DMarks) and the content-creation results were interesting in that they showed that the faster liquid-cooled card, when properly overclocked, could be beneficial. But results were overall mixed, and very much depended on the program in question. The in-game benchmarks that we ran showed a bit more promise and consistency.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the scores were relatively close at 1080p, with the overclocked MSI RTX 5090 eking out a slight 5% lead, which grew to 6% at 2K and disappeared entirely at 4K.

In this game, activating DLSS without frame generation muddied the waters quite a bit, with the test scores now suggesting no real advantage from the manual overclock or from the liquid-cooled card at stock settings. This is a bit misleading, however, as it appears the cards were running into a bit of a CPU bottleneck at the 1080p and 2K resolutions. We ran these tests using a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, which is one of the fastest consumer processors in the world, but even it seems to be at its limit here. Strangely, the non-overclocked RTX 5090 showed a lot more performance at 4K here, but we believe this to be an anomalous result. We'll look at it again in our full review of the card down the line.

We next, for kicks, enabled Nvidia's frame generation in this game, which is something of a poster child for DLSS and frame-gen. Once again, the GeForce RTX 5090 cards were bunched together at the 1080p resolution. We observed a greater difference at 2,560 by 1,440 and at 3,840 by 2,160, however, where the overclocked MSI Geforce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid performed about 8% faster than the Founders Edition model at both resolutions. The stock-settings RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid essentially tied with the Founders Edition here, with just a 3% difference in performance. So, our overclocking did a bit of lifting here.

Total War: Three Kingdoms showed us some unexpected results with the overclocked MSI graphics card, at some resolutions, performing slower than its stock-settings self. The MSI model of the RTX 5090 still managed to perform about 5% faster than the Founders Edition, but overclocking, in this case, proved less beneficial. Total War leans quite a bit on the CPU, so it's very possible that this game, too, here pushes the Ryzen 9 9950X to its limits and exacerbates a CPU bottleneck that was worsened a little by MSI Afterburner running in the background. That might explain why performance dropped at 1080p and 2K but increased at 4K. But with a graphics card as powerful as the RTX 5090, CPU limitations are unquestionably something you will need to keep in mind.

We'll see how this shakes out when we have time to run more games through the overclock wringer with this card. It may well be just down to the quirks of the CPU-reliant Total War.

Liquid-Cooled Power and Thermals

Using a Kill-a-Watt wall meter to measure the total power consumption of our GPU test bed, we were able to get a good idea of just how much power the RTX 5090 demands in a relative sense and how much overclocking the card altered that power draw. The RTX 5090 is clearly much power-hungrier than the RTX 4090, and though we didn’t touch the voltage in our brief overclock forays with the MSI Liquid card, increasing the clock speed of the GPU and the GDDR7 RAM was enough to jack up the power draw by up to 15%. That increase in power consumption was also very prominent in our Cyberpunk 2077 test runs.

Why did the power consumption increase if we didn’t raise the voltage? It's likely that the graphics card pulled closer to its default max power limit more often to maintain these elevated clocks. Any power headroom that was left in the default power plan on the MSI card was surely used up while operating at the clock speeds we set it to.

Thermal performance from the liquid cooler was a bit mixed in our Adobe Premiere Pro and Blender trails. Those tests tend to draw on the graphics card’s processing power for shorter periods, or in "spikier" fashion, and the Founders Edition card may have dealt with these less-prolonged changes in temperature more efficiently, as it has more cooling hardware closer to the GPU itself. In more sustained tests, like with Cyberpunk 2077, the liquid-cooled card tended to stay much cooler. But this is just a theory.

Is Liquid Cooling a GeForce RTX 5090 Worth It?

Though liquid cooling has far greater potential to keep your hardware cool under load, large air coolers can also be quite capable. Nvidia’s advanced RTX 5090 Founders Edition cooler makes this clear, and while at times the liquid-cooled MSI card was able to run cooler, the Founders Edition card's hardware still kept the RTX 5090 far from overheating.

Realistically, if you are just planning to buy a single RTX 5090 for a gaming PC, liquid cooling likely isn’t necessary, but it couldn’t hurt if you have a PC that can take a 360mm radiator in addition to whatever CPU cooling solution you have installed. (If you're liquid-cooling your CPU, you may need a whole new PC case to accommodate two oversize radiators.) Also note: We just ran some of our stock benchmarks here. One thing we didn’t test is how cool the cards would stay in a prolonged gaming session. This could change the outlook a bit, as heat can build up in a PC case over a period of time, and that scenario, typically, is where liquid coolers come into their own, able to push heat out of a case separately from the card itself to gain an advantage. That’s likely to make liquid-cooled variants of the RTX 5090 more beneficial. But you can rest assured, given the preponderance of air-cooled partner cards on the market, that Nvidia designed the RTX 5090 primarily for air cooling. It'll still be a beast.

If you are planning to operate more than one of these GPUs in a system, or want to see how far you can overclock an RTX 5090, though, an RTX 5090 that's liquid-cooled might be worth splashing out for. (Finding room for multiple radiators in one case is another matter!) That will help you to get the most out of overclocking, as you really don’t want more than one Founders Edition card pumping heat into your case. It’s going to get toasty enough in there, as it is, with just one.

[Editors' Note: Francisco La Hoz contributed to the testing in this story.]