Power and Temperature
Power
To test the power and temperature we perform a manual run-through in Cyberpunk 2077 at “Ultra” settings for real-world in-game data. We use GPU-Z sensor data to record the results. We report on the GPU-Z sensor data for “Board Power” and “GPU Chip Power” when available for our Wattage data. For temperature data, we report the GPU (Edge Temp of the GPU or Package Temp) as well as Hot Spot (Junction Temperature) when available for our temperature data.
Looking into powerful matters, we found that the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X consumed just 14.4W more than the RTX 4090 Founders Edition under a gaming workload. Looking further into it, the main contributor is the total board power rather than the GPU chip draw, thus, we suspect the main power differences here account for the additional fan and water pump that the Founders Edition do not have. Relatively speaking, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX did its needful while using nearly 50W less power.
On the subject of overclocking, we saw an increase to 433.6W on the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X which represents it using 9.2% more power than the stock configuration. For that extra power, we generally saw performance increase in the 5-6% range and thus is falling into the law of diminishing returns.
As mentioned back in the overclocking section, this is the first card we’ve had on the bench in a very long time where the power limit was not a limitation for us when overclocking.
Temperature
The ambient room temperature at the time of testing was 22 degrees Celsius.
Opening up the oven, we found the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X to be cooking its GPU at 53.6 degrees Celsius with a hotspot about 10 degrees higher at 63.5 degrees Celsius. This is significantly cooler than the RTX 4090 Founders Edition and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX’s temperature readings.
When overclocking the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X, we did increase all fan speeds to 100% and found the temperature dropped even further to 48.8 degrees Celsius with a 60.4-degree hot spot.