Overclocking the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G
How do you overclock an MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G video card? Well before we begin to overclock, we need to find out the real-world in-game GPU frequency the video card is operating at by default. That way we can find what frequency we are overclocking from and how much gain we get in overclocking. Keep in mind that NVIDIA GPU Boost already adjusts the GPU frequency dynamically to utilize most of the potential that is there. This means it will already clock the GPU frequency well above the quoted Boost Clock even without overclocking.
Default Clock
The base clock on this video card is 2235MHz, which isn’t very helpful as it is the same as the Founders Edition. More importantly, it is the GPU Boost Clock that makes the difference and it is set at 2625MHz on the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G. This is 105MHz higher than the Founders Edition GPU Boost of 2520MHz.
The MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G pegged the 2805MHz frequency during testing and maintained a temperature of 53.6 degrees Celsius. Compared to the Founders Edition which averaged 2745MHz, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G clocks 2.2% faster out of the box. Memory in both the Founders Edition and the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G is set to 21GHz using GDDR6X memory.
Highest Stable Overclock
To dial in the maximum overclock for the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G, we used MSI’s Afterburner software that’s well known across the enthusiast community for making lots of knobs to turn and levers to pull available for tuning enjoyment.
We started by maxing the Power Target out at 10% over default and cranking the fans up to 100%. During testing, we found that the power limit was not an issue with the overclock, which is the first time this reviewer has encountered such a scenario in the past decade. We found that with no voltage adjustment, the card would hover in the 80-85% of the power limit during gaming.
Given we had some power to spare, we pushed voltage up some, to +40mV, which resulted in a higher observed GPU clock and a stable gaming environment.
With the power matters settled, we started by pushing the core clock up as high as it could go without touching the memory side of the equation. We were able to pick up an extra 110MHz on the sliders before we started crashing.
Next up, we set the core back to stock and boosted the memory to see how far we could take it. Surprisingly enough, it was quite happy with +1500MHz. This is a boost to 24GHz over the stock of 21Ghz.
Putting it all together, we first tried our max individual clocks together to see how they worked. Initially, it seemed like it was going to be in the cards, but about three games into testing, we found that we had to back off just a little bit to stabilize those games. This gave us a final stable overclock of a 2875MHz core boost clock and a 24GHz memory clock.
Comparing the sustained GPU frequency to the stock frequency, we see that the observed overclocked frequency pegged itself at 3075MHz. This is a 9.6% increase over the stock clocks and a 12% increase over the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. The memory at 24GHz is 14.3% faster than the stock clock as well. This overclock dunks on what the Founders Edition can do.
