Conclusion
Our review of the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X gave us a nice opportunity to evaluate the best of the best MSI has to offer. This video card represents the fastest GPU NVIDIA offers in a beautifully appointed package. The cooling performance is excellent as well. We tested at 4K with and without Ray Tracing enabled and also overclocked the video card. Our comparison was the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX a very good performer as you can see.
Performance
There isn’t a whole lot to say here that the pictures don’t already show you. From start to finish, regardless of what you throw at the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X it came out on top. In plain 4K, the margin was 20% and upscaling 18%. A couple of games were very close to even and in all these games neither card really warranted the benefit from upscaling. Fast results all around.
When we enable Ray Tracing the demands are real. Still, the MSI RTX 4909 SUPRIM X performed well and shows playable results in all games at the highest settings without the need for DLSS or FSR. Adding that component is the icing on the cake. The AMD RX 7900 XTX was simply outperformed at every turn. Although the Ray Tracing abilities of the AMD RX video cards are starting to improve by some good measure with upscaling technology.
Overclocking
The overclocking experience was a mixed bag. The process was straightforward, made easy by MSI Afterburner (in part because we have been using this software for decades, literally). Unfortunately, the overall result was a little disappointing. Our final clock adjustment was +155MHz in order to run in all our games. We were able to set +185MHz and see the boost clock hit 3030MHz, however, F1 was a fail at this settling. Voltage adjustment did not affect the real-time adjustment by the video card BIOS. The most we saw was 1.050 Volts in any scenario. With this stout cooling system, we certainly should be able to set a higher VCore. We did not see a real-time benefit from memory overclocking. It seems simply a bragging right sort of thing.
With speed and performance comes power usage. The MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM X does require more wattage. Our highest board power reading was 450 Watts, as noted in the game performance testing. We never approached the limit set by the “gaming” BIOS switch of 480 Watts. The benchmark runs we use for power testing registered 411 Watts. Kill-a-watt readings were between 540 and 650 Watts for the total system draw during testing. Our aging HX 1050 fan sounded like a helicopter.
Well, one last thing……
The one thing that we do in our reviews is generate a bunch of data. We were thinking about how this MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X stands up against the two other RTX 4090 video cards we’ve reviewed. Yes, they were reviewed at different times and on different platforms and yes you can argue that will skew the results. But….we have shown that there is very little difference in frame rate data between CPUs at 4K using the RTX 4090. Also, we use the same benchmarks for power and temperature. So…
Performance testing IS difficult to decipher but generally speaking, all three video cards are very close to one another, as they should be. At default clocks, generally, the MSI Liquid X and air-cooled SUPRIM X RTX 4090s will overshadow the Founders Edition more times than not. This is most likely a result of MSI’s factory overclocks. Overclocked, the results are more game dependent, but all three cards are very much alike, with similar real-time Boost clock frequencies. In Ray Tracing all three are essentially the same. All three are the best Ray Tracing cards available.
Power and cooling demonstrate that the Founders Edition uses a slightly bit less wattage. The Liquid SUPRIM is the coolest running, as it should be. The air-cooled SUPRIM X is 5 degrees lower than the Founders Edition. The Liquid and air-cooled RTX 4090 SUPRIM X comes with generous factory overclocks which may tilt power usage a bit.
Final Points
This MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X 24G video card lives up to the billing. It hits all the marks. It looks amazing, is very well built, and is superbly cooled. It rips through gameplay and is more than competent at Ray Tracing. It’s big and has a price tag to match.
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a formidable opponent that is improving in Ray Tracing with each passing generation. It also costs much less to own. So much less you could have the card and money left over to buy a completely new platform to go with it for what you pay for the MSI RTX 4090 SUPRIM X alone.
All that said, if you want the best video card right now you can buy (and you CAN buy this one) this would be the one.
