Maybe it’s just us. Maybe we just have insanely high expectations… but when we plunk down the equivalent of a mortgage payment on a McMansion for a freakin’ video card we want it just to exude excessively. We want it to be so over the top that it could have starred in an early ought Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. We preface this section with the above musing because the shipping container MSI has bestowed upon their RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC is insane. Insane in a good way that almost feels like it should have been dropped off by a couple of super models who just happened to also be stepping out of a swimming pool from the Y2K-era teen comedy movies.
Pictures rarely convey how impressive (or conversely bad) a product is, so when we say “insane” we mean a shipping container that is over 18 inches long. About a foot deep. And…
Nearly 10 inches tall.
Yes. This is a box that you will instinctively want to ‘lift with your knees’ when you go to pick it up. Which is a good thing as the package weight is listed at an official 4.2 Kilograms. In Freedom Units that is nearly nine and a half pounds. Just for a video card and its protective shipping container.
Opening up you can see that MSI uses so much internal medium-density foam that you could easily pack two normal (aka air-based) video cards into two normal-dimensioned shipping containers.
Mix in extremely concise and yet encompassing data on the sides of the box, with some very sweet accessories like that 4way cable with integrated safety go/no-go gauge and we doubt few will be anything other than impressed with MSI.
The one downside is that this shipping does give a somewhat overinflated impression of the RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC itself. Make no mistake this is a highly impressive video card. It is just not the size of a (mid-sized) Tower case like one may infer based on that jumbo-sized box. Instead, the card itself is not actually that big. It is certainly not a 4-slot model. It is not even a (true) 3-slot GPU.
Instead, it is a 2.5-slot card that is attached by two ~19-inch water tubes, which in turn are attached to a 3×120 ‘thin’ radiator. That is a lot of hardware to protect while in transit. Even yes, it is a lot of hardware to install into a mid-sized case; however, it is a lot easier to install the RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC into a case than any of those previously mentioned monster-sized (aka air-based) RTX 5090 or RTX 4090 cards.
We say this for a few reasons. Firstly. Most modern mid-tower PC cases can easily accommodate at least one 360 AIO. Typically in the front. Sometimes at the top. Sometimes in the bottom. Sometimes a combination of two of the three options. Sometimes all three are possible installation locations. Yes. None of the design teams for said cases ever imagined those zones being used for a video card, and instead envisioned an AIO attached to a CPU… but the fact remains installation issues are not that much worse than it was when MSI was trying to get a piddly little 2×120 radiator to properly cool a RTX 4090!
As such installation issues do exist, but they are not as extreme as they once were. Simply spend an extra minute or three thinking about your system build (or upgrade) and what mid-tower (or larger) case would work best for your CPU and GPU cooling needs. For example, MSI MAG PANO 100R will only set you back maybe 2 bills in Canuckistan dollars and net you top+bottom+side 360 AIO compatibility. The same goes for NZXTs various options. Corsair. Fractal Define. Basically, this is a decent litmus test to “pre-sort” out the garbage of the case industry by simply ensuring it can accept at least one 360 rad… and preferably two (or more)
Before we move on, we do feel the need to point out that all the water in the long tubes, the large radiator… and the water inside said rad do make up a major chunk of the official 2.969KG (or a smidgen over 6 and half pounds in hamburger units). As such MSI may want to further break it down into smaller portions. We say that as on paper, and without doing further research, that seems like a lot of weight to be hanging off the motherboard. Which it would be if this was an air-based cooling solution… which most “mid-sized” RTX 5090s (like the rather svelte by 5090 standard RTX 5090 Suprim SOC) actually do weigh. Do weight and do expect to be hung off the motherboard.
