MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC Review

Final Score: 97 out 100

When it comes to the entirety of the 5090 class of video cards we are of two minds. On the one hand, as a consumer, we are strongly reminded of The Bard Zevon when he said “Somehow I got stuck between a rock and a hard place… Send lawyers, guns, and money. The (f)it has hit the (sh)an”. We say this as the cost of these video cards is more than we paid for our first pickup truck. It was not all that long ago when 6bills was considered an “extreme” price for an uber-high-end GPU, and yet here we are seriously considering 2 to 2.5K video cards.

On the other hand… yeah… we are seriously considering them. They are just that good… and we hate ourselves just a wee bit because we have to publicly admit that. Self-loathing or not, when viewed disappointedly we can see numerous use case scenarios for the 5090-class in general, but the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid OC in specific. First and foremost, no one can deny its performance. When you combine 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR7 memory, on a 512-bit wide bus capable of 1.79TB/s we might add, with all those Cuda Cores and all those AI cores work gets done. It gets done so bloody fast that if you are a professional whose workload requires you to throw a lot of GPU processing power at it… well… it’s kinda hard to not think of the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid OC as a money-generating machine. We have clients who if they could would buy three of these beasts for each workstation they would. Without batting an eye if it meant that the time savings were compounded compared to “just” using one per workstation. They would happily spend twice that as it would be made back in a couple of months at most. Leaving the rest of the product life cycle to churn out pure profitnium in copious amounts.

The same is true for enthusiasts. If you have the money and want to tell a company to “give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire” the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid OC makes one hell of a case in its favor. It is the video card equivalent not of Lars(e and his Larpers) but the original Man In Black. Yes. For this generation, this card is the epitome of the Man Who Comes Around. Not Gigabyte. Not ASRock. Not even Big Daddy ASUS. Instead, the rider of the pale horse and his name that sat upon him is Suprim Liquid OC. Period. Dot. Forget all the rest, and instead buy the best (of the best).

So let’s break our reasoning down. Thanks to finally getting the memo on dual bay AIO not offering enough cooling (especially when using a 2×120 and not even a 2x140mm) and going for the big boi 360 AIO option this is a hassle-free overclocking card… as it does itself. Throw the switch to performance mode, aka full monty 50A, and it will give you everything that big boi Blackwell core has to offer… or at least everything NVIDIA has allowed MSI to give you. Equally impressive it can do so without a screaming loud noise profile, dumping all that heat inside the case, not taking up four PCIe slots, and do all that while also being cheaper than some of the air-based options from the competition demand.

Even excluding the savings portion from the equation why is all that important? It is important because outside of even high-end games, CPU processing power demand typically scales linearly right along with GPU power requirements, and sadly dumping 600 watts worth of space heater energy into the case will make the CPU thermally limit faster. Put bluntly. Yes. NVIDIA has a beast of a core, but it is a power-hungry, hot-running core. One that even if one water cools the CPU and motherboard VRM and RAM and storage subsystems that is a lot of hot air to handle. You will need a lot of case fans to dump fresh air in faster than this core can heat it up. Compare and contrast that headache with the fact that this cheaper MSI option dumps all that power-robbing, thermal-limiting heat outside the case. Simply make sure the CPU rad fans don’t suck it back in and you can easily make a workstation system that smokes even the most expensive of air based 5090 GPU-based system equivalents you care to create… and do so at noticeably lower decibels. Making the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid OC as big a siren song to low noise system builder as it is for gamers… professionals… and everyone else willing to pony up the asking price.

Furthermore with a reasonable 2.5-slot configuration, one can easily fit one or even two more PCIe cards onto a typical-sized motherboard without resorting to ribbon cables or ‘vertical mounting’ the GPU. We cannot overstate how big a deal breaker it is trying to work a single 3.25/3.5/… “4+” slot GPU into a system that also needs room for a capture card, a sound card, HBA (or SAS) controller card, a 10/20/etc NIC, or a myriad of other Add-In Cards that are required for a true professional’s build. All of these will not fit when you use the more common “3plus” form-factored cards (which are a 4-slot form-factored card… just with better PR).

This trifecta of performance, ease of use, and flexibility makes for one hell of an argument in its favor.

Of course, on the other hand… it may offer all that and be less expensive than some of the other guy’s options… but it is a 2500 freakin dollar video card. However, if we are seriously considering dropping 2Gs on a video card we would have had to suffer a traumatic brain injury to not find room for this 2.5K card over a Flounder… err Founder’s Edition… as at this point cost is of secondary concern to a given build. Of secondary concern and yet all those benefits the extra couple hundred dollars bring to the table are what will make or break a build.

So if you do have to cash to drop on this beast from the east it is one of the very few you should drop this kind of coin on. Congratulations MSI. You have finally gotten the Liquid formula right and it is going to be hard to go back to high-end air after using it. We just hope that x70 or at least x80-class Suprim Liquid models also become available for us mere mortals who may build but rarely use cards that cost more than a weekend in Vegas does. Do that and we will change the type of cases we typically use in builds so as to be able to fit a 360 in the front (for the GPU) and a 360 AIO in the top (for the CPU). It is straight-up game-changing and innovative.

As such we have to applaud MSI for not being afraid to think outside the box. To Think Big. To allow their design team the freedom to use bigger and better cooling solutions. We just hope that this innovation trickles down the competition and we see the same cooling revolution we saw in the CPU industry occur throughout the GPU industry. Either way, MSI is showing the way forward. Forward to a future where the GPU slurping down more power and creating more heat, than the CPU no longer matters all that much (from a cooling perspective). May Dog Have Mercy on our PSUs and our wallets… as future high-end builds will most certainly not.