MSI’s Lighting Z RTX 5090 is seemingly very impressive. With AIO liquid cooling and a huge screen, MSI says it is “Built to sustain 1000W loads with absolute stability.” I wouldn’t know personally, as I’m a mere mortal and not one of the 1,300 lucky enough to spend over $5,000 on one. However, we have seen some testing, and MSI weren’t lying about that power draw. It’s a thirsty beast.
KitGuruTech managed to get their hands on it, and in gaming tests, they saw a max pull of 1076 W in Cyberpunk 2077 when overclocked. The rig they have popped that monstrously powerful card in has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an MSI X870 Carbon motherboard, plus 64 GB of DDR5 memory, and an MSI MPG 1600 W power supply.
It’s worth noting that KitGuru runs Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with RT overdrive and no DLSS, which is “all designed to put maximum load on the GPU.” Though Cyberpunk’s max is 1076 W, the average sits around the mid 700s, which is still about 120 W above what our gaming tests got for the RTX 5090 Founders Edition.
A Plague Tale: Requiem got an average of around 650 W with a max of 754 W. Tests for Hardware Unboxed tell a similar story, getting up to 845 W in A Plague Tale: Requiem, with it dropping down to 731 W without overclocking. Non-overclocking power consumption still sits comfortably higher than the Founders Edition RTX 5090 (by between 20-70 W), but figures across the board report big performance gains too.
Our friends over at Tom’s Hardware got time with the card, and report 14 average fps higher across their suite of tests than the RTX 5090 FE, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle being the biggest difference at 25 average FPS.
The Lightning Z comes with two 600 W 12V-2×6 connectors, plus a USB Type-C port to connect to the built-in screen. Perhaps the most unique part of the card, as we reported last month, is the fact that it is watercooled and designed to “completely ignore the concepts of balance in favour of extremes.”
Nothing shows the extremes of this MSI card more than the price, with us spotting it being listed for an unfortunately rather funny $5090 over at Best Buy. Now you may say a $3,000 increase on the RTX 5090 MSRP for a 15% performance bump absolutely isn’t worth the cash, but you’d have to assume you can get one right now, which is a pretty big assumption.
If you need an entire rig though, you can pick up an RTX 5090 PC (with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, and 2 TB of SSD storage), for around $500 less than the Lightning Z. I certainly know where my money would be going, and not just because I’d need a time machine, luck, and a seriously loaded bank account to want that 1000 W behemoth.
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