Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X is the company's flagship liquid-cooled graphics card, based on NVIDIA's new flagship GPU, the RTX 4090 "Ada Lovelace," which we've extensively reviewed for you today across as many brands as we could get our hands on. The Suprim Liquid X builds on the short legacy of MSI's refreshing new Suprim graphics card brand, which replaced the Lightning and Gaming Z brands at the top of MSI's product stack. Slick, subtle styling, and rich materials are the new standard. Suprim is MSI's attempt at outdoing NVIDIA's Founders Edition in product design, without losing sight of MSI's main objective—to be the fastest graphics card out of the box, with the highest headroom and features for enthusiasts. This review will tell you just how far MSI goes to meet this goal. We're also reviewing the air-cooled sibling of this card, the RTX 4090 Suprim X.



The GeForce RTX 4090 sees NVIDIA turn the page on its "Ampere" architecture, and bring in "Ada," which heralds the 3rd generation of NVIDIA's pioneering RTX technology. This is NVIDIA's attempt at increasing realism in PC graphics, as if Moore's Law were still alive. This is done through a mountain of innovations, such as real time ray tracing, AI deep-learning based performance enhancements, and whole system-latency improvements. The 3rd generation RTX with "Ada" brings you 3rd generation RT cores that accelerate real-time ray tracing; 4th generation Tensor cores for AI deep-learning, which plays a vital role both as a ray tracing denoiser, as well as a superscaling algorithm. With "Ada," NVIDIA is also introducing Optical Flow Processor, a piece of hardware that helps the GPU generate entirely unique frames using only AI, without involving the main graphics rendering machinery, thereby doubling frame-rates.

The RTX 4090 is based on the new 5 nm AD102 silicon, a mammoth 76 billion-transistor chip that physically isn't larger than its predecessor, thanks to the huge transistor-density uplift from the new foundry node. What's more, the power characteristics of the RTX 4090 aren't too different from the RTX 3090 Ti, with 450 W typical board power; however the RTX 4090 aims to offer a 50% generational performance uplift, which can be as high as 100% if you consider the RTX 3080 to be NVIDIA's previous-gen flagship (NVIDIA does).

NVIDIA carved the RTX 4090 out of the AD102 by enabling 128 out of 144 SM (streaming multiprocessors), which work out to 16,384 CUDA cores, 512 Tensor cores, 128 RT cores, 512 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The GPU keeps the same video memory setup as the RTX 3090 Ti—24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 384-bit wide interface; but has significantly enlarged the on-die caches, much like AMD did with its current RDNA2.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X is the only liquid-cooled RTX 4090 we are reviewing today—all the others are air-cooled. This is also the only card with a small 2-slot footprint; because it brings with it a 240 mm separate radiator, an all-in-one (AIO) closed-loop liquid cooling solution. The AIO liquid cooler pulls heat from the GPU and memory, while the VRM and other components are cooled by a network of heatsinks cooled by a single 100 mm fan on the card itself. MSI is including high-quality fans with the radiator of this card. Despite the liquid-cooling contraption, the Suprim Liquid X retains the essential design aesthetic that defines MSI Suprim. MSI gave the Suprim Liquid X a factory overclock of 2.62 GHz, compared to 2.52 GHz reference. The card is priced at $1750, a well-contained $150 (9%) premium over the $1,600 baseline price.