MSI RTX 5090 Suprim SOC review

This thing is a monster. Obviously in the same way the RTX 5090 Founders Edition is a monster in terms of raw performance; we are still talking about the most powerful consumer GPU available to humankind after all. But more than that, the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim is probably the biggest graphics card I’ve ever had the misfortune to balance delicately on the ickle PCB we use to measure GPU power draw.

I am slightly afraid for the continued happiness of our test rig with this frankly enormous card placed delicately atop it. In fairness, the XFX RX 9070 XT Merc is almost the same size, so it’s not like MSI or Nvidia are alone out there with hoofing great graphics cards.

Thankfully the package does come with a wee stand in order to take some of the strain off a standard PCIe bracket when installed horizontally, but in all honesty it’s still going to have its work cut out for it given the heft of this thing. It’s a large card, I guess is what I’m saying.

With the decreased size of the comparatively diminutive RTX 5090 Founders Edition, it’s maybe something of a surprise to see MSI’s RTX 5090 Suprim coming in with such a big shroud. But all of the third-party cards in this generation seem to be trending towards the chonky compared with the FE cards.

Nvidia does say its partners are free to use the PCB from the Founders Edition if they wish, but I would expect the standard GPU mainboard is far cheaper. I also expect the partners needed to have their overall cooling and shroud designs in place well before they knew exactly what targets they had in terms of keeping things chill for Blackwell.

The upshot, however, is that the Suprim is *ahem* supremely cool because of that monstrous heatsink. It can also deliver much higher clock speeds and therefore a chunk more performance than the Nvidia reference card. Given that this MSI version of the RTX 5090 comes in well above the $1,999 MSRP Nvidia originally set for the card, you would hope for high frame rates at least.

Its near $2,750 MSI MSRP is not a huge surprise given what’s happened with the rest of the cards in this generation so far, but still, with the MSI RTX 5090 Suprim being another $750 on top of the standard MSRP, it’s a little tough to swallow. More so given that even if you could find one in stock today, it would likely be priced far higher even than that.

This pricing would have been even harder to cope with if you’d spent that much around launch. Should you have paid your near-$3,000 sticker price for the card, got it home and installed it in your rig without snapping off the PCIe slot, there’s a good chance you would have been left seriously unimpressed when you booted up your PC.

I know I was when I first started benchmarking this card. There’s a reason this review is so much later than the January 31 launch date for the third-party RTX 5090 cards, and it’s not because I’ve since been inundated with new GPUs—though I 100% have been—it’s because it was hella b0rked.

In some games I was getting the expected great performance, over and above the Founders Edition, but in others I’d either get crashed back to desktop, suffer a blackscreen until the GPU driver restarted, or get a total blackscreen freeze, which would need a total system restart.

Not a good look for a brand new $2,750+ graphics card.

A month, some blank looks, and a lot of shrugged shoulders later, MSI released a new VBIOS, Nvidia released a new driver, and all seems to be as it should. I now have the RTX 5090 Suprim as it ought to have been at launch: a highly overclocked, super-cool, absolutely vast GPU that is able to devour high-end 4K games for breakfast and come back for seconds.

At its heart is the GB202 graphics processor from Nvidia; the top RTX Blackwell GPU promising a future of Neural Rendering and a today filled with AI-powered Multi Frame Generation shamelessly bumping up frame rates and smoothing out a ton of the latest modern games. If you want the full beans I’ve gone into detail in the main RTX 5090 review on the new Nvidia RTX Blackwell architecture.

This Suprim SOC is an overclocked card, and I measured a near 200 MHz factory overclock in real terms, though the stated boost clock numbers suggest MSI was only aiming for around 150 MHz off the production line. As we’ve seen from successive generations of GeForce GPUs, however, those stated numbers rarely match a generally more positive reality. And so, possibly thanks to that swollen cooling array, I’m seeing an average clock speed in Metro Exodus of 2,728 MHz vs the Founders Edition at 2,530 MHz.

And even at that speed it’s 22% cooler than the slight Founders Edition card. Sadly, all that extra frequency doesn’t actually translate to much in the way of extra performance. On average I’m seeing a little under 5% higher frame rates at 4K, which is as good as it gets, with 1440p frame rates just 3% higher on average.

But, being a 2025 GPU it’s still got some overclocking headroom left in there, and I was easily able to add another 240 MHz offset to the equation, which sees the Metro Exodus average clock speed hike up to 2,942 MHz. Which gets you another 2% higher frame rates. Which is… not significant, I’ll grant you.

PC Gamer test rig
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master | RAM: G.Skill 32 GB DDR5-6000 CAS 30 | Cooler: Corsair H170i Elite Capellix | SSD: 2 TB Crucial T700 | PSU: Seasonic Prime TX 1600W | Case: DimasTech Mini V2

If you’re interested in running an RTX 5090 then chances are that you’re not too worried about power draw, but it is worth noting the overclocked MSI card chows down a ton more power than the Founders Edition. The FE pulls 637 W at max, while the Surpim in gaming mode (there’s a dual-BIOS switch if you don’t want all the performance, for some reason) draws 687 W, and with my +240 MHz overclock it hits 697 W.

Still, we are talking about the absolute fastest graphics card I’ve ever strapped into the PC Gamer test rig, which has to count for something.

And it probably would if the $750 price premium wasn’t there staring me in the face all the while I’ve been testing this card. Spending 38% more for—at best—7% higher frame rates is frankly ludicrous. I’ll give you that the RTX 5090 is largely out of stock now, and with the lower spec MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio on Amazon for $4,885 right now, if you could find it at that $2,750 sticker price it would seem like a bit of a bargain.

But honestly, I am not here for the grossly inflated pricing that has accompanied the GPU class of ’25 so far, whether from scalpers on Ebay or Amazon, or from retailers or greedy AIBs.

However it rolls out once things have calmed down some, the extra pricing of the RTX 5090 Suprim still isn’t justified by its actual performance. Even a couple hundred dollars would have been a push, but $750 more than the Founders card? Nah, that’s just way too much for what you’re getting here.