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MSI RTX 5090 Suprim SOC Review

As mentioned at the start of this review, MSI's RTX 5090 Suprim SOC is really an insane graphics card in every sense of the word – the cooling performance, size, power draw and pricing are all pretty nuts to think about. Of course, that's both positive and negative depending on the specific area you are looking at, and that does make this quite a tricky review to conclude!

First things first, on an objective level, there's no doubt MSI has built a highly effective graphics card. We saw thermal performance that was either on-par with the Nvidia Founders Edition or a good chunk better, depending on which BIOS was used, while noise levels were lower across the board – significantly so when using the Silent BIOS. Of course, considering how much larger the Suprim SOC is over the FE model, we would expect improved thermals, but MSI has not failed to deliver in that regard.

Actual gaming performance also improved by more than I was expecting. We did all of our game benchmarking with the Gaming BIOS enabled, and this resulted in gains of 4-7% over the FE – not huge amounts, but more than your typical AIB card uplift. Power draw did also increase using this mode and we measured almost 607 Watts of juice being pulled by the Suprim alone, which really is quite something! However, the increase in power is effectively balanced out by the increase performance, so we did not record any loss of efficiency versus the Founders Edition.

Overclocking didn't net us huge gains, but could be worth doing if you want to extract every last drop of performance – our sample ran at 3GHz fairly comfortably, while the GDDR7 memory topped out at over 33Gbps.

We can't end this review without a discussion on pricing, however – perhaps the most eyebrow-raising element of this graphics card. That's because it's listed for £2600 on Currys, and even more at OCUK. I asked MSI if they had an official MSRP but we were not given one for this review. I would have to think that the current prices are inflated due to the lack of stock – after all, cards were almost non-existent on launch day, but we'll just have to wait and see how things unfold.

However, if pricing does persist at this level, it really does seem crazy to me. I mean, I get that this is a good graphics card, but is it really £660 better than the Founders Edition – a 31% premium? Perhaps the £1939 MSRP was never realistic to begin with, and there's no denying some enthusiasts do have deep pockets – but even then, £2600 is simply a vast amount of money to spend on a single graphics card, especially one that was meant to start at under two grand.

All of that does make concluding this review quite challenging. I could understand MSI pricing the Suprim SOC at, say, £2200 – a 13% premium over the baseline MSRP – and you could easily argue that the enhanced cooling, lower noise levels and other features, such as dual-BIOS, would make it worth the extra outlay. At £2600+, I struggle to really recommend this graphics card and can only hope that pricing drops as supply increases.

Pros

  • Reasonable performance gains over the RTX 5090 Founders Edition.
  • Quad-slot cooler reduces thermals and noise levels compared to the FE.
  • Our sample hit 3GHz when overclocking with relative ease.
  • Huge 32GB GDDR7 frame buffer.
  • DLSS 4 has improved Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution scaling.
  • Multi Frame Generation enables higher frame rates than would otherwise be possible.

Cons

  • Absurd increase in price over the £1939 MSRP.
  • Very high power demands.
  • It's absolutely enormous.

KitGuru says: Taken in isolation, the Suprim SOC is a very impressive graphics card. The price increase does boggle the mind, however, so we have to hope things will start to make more sense as supply levels increase.

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Rating: 7.0.

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