RTX 4090 Water vs Air Testing! Gigabyte Gaming OC & MSI SUPRIM Liquid X

the RTX 4090 has been out for about a week now so it's high time I get started on my third party reviews and today I'm kicking that off with a review of the MSI Supreme Liquid X as well as the gigabyte gaming OC variants of this graphics card my goal is to show how these two coolers perform versus the founders Edition which I already covered which uses this cooler which has two fans and a pass-through and notably is supposed to be available for the MSRP of 1600 US dollars if you can find it in stock these two methods use air and water so it's sort of an elemental battle here with the gigabyte gaming OC representing the direction that a lot of add-in board manufacturers have gone with this card which is a large cooler as big as you can make it 13 and a half inches long on this one with three fans lots of aluminum fins and copper heat pipes to keep all of the heat moving away from the GPU and out into the air around it and then with MSI you've got the Supreme Liquid X which is simply attached a 240 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler to the GPU to see if water can cool this down a little bit more efficiently so I'm testing two cards today but I just wanted to point out that I have another RTX 4090 video coming soon that will follow up with some testing on the Asus tough card that I also showed off in my unboxing video where I unboxed all these cards and I had a late arrival from colorful this is the iGame Vulcan it got held up in customs so it arrived too late for the unboxing but I will be testing those as well in a follow-up video don't want to get ahead of myself though let's get started on this one [Music] today's video is brought to you by the new FX series of cases and CPU coolers from be quiet combining addressable RGB lighting with legendary build quality top tier performance and near silent operation the purebase 500 FX can fit up to a 360 millimeter all-in-one or tall air coolers while keeping things chilly thanks to airflow optimized top and front panels the pure Loop 2 FX liquid cooler comes in three sizes and supports all modern mainstream CPUs and the pure rock 2 FX air cooler can handle up to 150 watts TDP with style and ease be quiet's FX series products are suitable for any build in need of a functional and tasteful RGB upgrade so click the sponsor Link in the video description for more I'm going to start out with gigabyte gaming OC but one quick note before I get into it for my video today as well as any videos that you're watching comparing various RTX 4090s against each other when it comes to the GPU at the center of all of these RTX 490s you're dealing with basically the same chip it's going to have the same Cuda core count the same specifications that I went over in my launch review of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition with is going to make these cards different from each other is going to be the design of the cooler itself the design of the PCB and possibly the components that go on top of that possibly some extras that might be included like a dual V bios that you can switch between or some stuff that might be included in the box like a GPU anti-sag support bracket but the main thing for me that differentiates any one card from another is going to be performance and that's not just going to be determined by the design choices of gigabytes for the cooler that they've built but also the quality of the GPU itself and that varies from GPU to GPU so even if you're looking at two of the exact same graphics cards from gigabyte or MSI or Founders edition cards you might find slightly varying performance between those so that's just something to keep in mind the other major area of concern is going to be price and for that we already know the founders Edition costs sixteen hundred dollars so how much more do these third-party versions costs and is it worth it well definitely you shouldn't be buying from some place like Amazon where it's only being sold by a scalper Marketplace reseller for two thousand six hundred dollars but both on Best Buy Ai and on NewEgg this card is currently listing for Seventeen hundred dollars and that's a one hundred dollar markup over the founders Edition so that makes the question is this card worth one hundred dollars more than the founders Edition can you even find either of them in stock or should you opt for something like gigabytes wind force or one of the other sixteen hundred dollar cards because each manufacturer does seem to have at least one of those and if you're looking at a card like this versus an overclock card you might only be getting a modest overclock with the OC variants anyway this card for example in the gaming mouse has a boost clock of 2535 megahertz which seems like a lot but then you compare it to the founders Edition which is 2520 you get a whole 15 megahertz overclock with this card out of the box compared to the founders Edition or just the non-oc version that said this car does have something the founders Edition doesn't which is that V bio switch which defaults to an OC or a silent mode and I ran all my tests in the OC mode by the way but of course you can also just flash either of those V bioses or adjust them and just have the advantage of two biosis which also gives you much more ease of mind if you want to Tinker with that sort of thing because if you happen to Brick one of the V bioses you can switch to the other one to reflash the original one or get yourself back up and running you get a four year warranty which is up one year from the three year warranty on the founders Edition does require online registration beyond that the cooler is branded as one of gigabytes wind Force coolers and it does have a fair amount of RGB integrated you can control with gigabytes RGB Fusion software and then you also get some RGB Accents in the gigabyte logo here along the side and you get a full metal backplate along the back except for the part right here where the air is meant to pass through from that third cooling fan video outs remain the same as the founders Edition and the windforce cooler has three 110 millimeter fans as well as 10 composite copper heat pipes do note that the one in the middle spins the opposite direction as the ones on the outside which gigabyte claims to improve the cooling it does have fan stop mode so the fans won't spin at all when the GPU isn't hot enough in terms of the cooler itself it has a pretty sizable Vapor chamber down here at the bottom as well as a plate that extend turns out to provide some additional cooling for the vram and of course it maintains that pass-through cooling standard that Nvidia has pretty much made standard across the board at this time and I apologize for not having quite as much b-roll of like the lighting and stuff on this fan as I could I was focused more on the performance but I will include a link to this gigabyte website where you can cycle through quite a few different RGB effects and you can even go and like change the color that you want it to be and stuff like that oh and I guess it also has a little light that indicates whether or not your 12 VH power is plugged in or not which is also convenient and now let's look at some card performance I'm running cyberpunk 2077 at 4K using the ray traced Ultra preset and you can see the stats for the card on screen the typical gaming fan speed that I was seeing without overclocking or anything like that was 76 percent which did seem a little bit on the high side that was about 1900 to 2100 RPM however this cooler is very quiet as you'll see in my sound testing stats in just a moment so we'll come back to that the GPU clock speed was 2670 to 27 30 megahertz fluctuating just a little little bit but staying pretty steady GPU and memory temps were both in the mid 60s so that's looking good and the ray traced Ultra frame rate is 40 to 45 FPS which isn't the best frame rate considering we're talking about the fastest graphics card available right now but cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty new game and this is with all of the eye candy turned on to Max at 4K and we'll see if we can boost that with a little bit of overclocking in a moment but the GPU power at stock was about 430 to 435 Watts I then dialed in an overclock my fans were set to 80 speed which is supposed to be a step up from the like 40 to 50 percent that most cards usually run at it's actually only about a five percent Improvement here but that did lower temperatures some we're at max power limit 133 percent plus 280 on the core Clock Plus 1450 on the memory clock that resulted in a 2815 megahertz boost setting on the GPU and the memory at 14.94. now I use those overclock settings for the charts I'm going to show you in a few minutes here but then when I actually went in for my more extended cyberpunk play test I found I was encountering a little bit of instability so I dialed it back slightly to plus 265 on the GPU core and plus 1425 on the memory that resulted in Ray traced Ultra performance of 2985 megahertz GPU clock speeds power draw definitely kicked up some to about 500 to 505 watts and the frame rate increased only about five to seven FPS 45 to 52 FPS is what we were getting meanwhile the GPU and memory attempts were about the same 65 to 68 degrees Celsius and this is sort of offset by the fact that I increased the fan speed while also increasing the frequency but I was still a little disappointed with that frame rate of 45 to 52 FPS so I did one more pass with dlss balanced mode enabled and here the GPU clock speed actually increased to about 3000 megahertz GPU power actually decreased to maybe 415 to 440 Watts bear in mind that it's actually rendering the game at a lower resolution and then upscaling it so that's part of the reason there we did get a nice boost to frame rates to 90 to 95 FPS meanwhile the GPU and memory temperatures further decreased to 58 to 62 degrees Celsius and that's because we're running the same fan speeds with putting slightly less of load on those components I do have some charts comparing the performance of both of these cards to the founders Edition which I will come to but for now let's switch over to the MSI Supreme Liquid X RTX 1490 and the comment I've gotten most about this card especially since I did the unboxing video is that people really seem to appreciate the Aesthetics and I don't know if that's because thanks to the liquid cooling MSI was able to fit this card in what seems to be a pretty sleek and spelled two slot design and this one with its brush Metal finish the attention to detail with the beveled edges around the outside and the I will say tasteful RGB since it does have accents down here with the Chevron beside the integrated cooling fan as well as on the new supreme logo here on the back they are RGB LEDs but it defaults to White and so it's given this car a little bit more of a classy feel I'd say than some of the super gamer cards that are out there of course I'm sure you'll have to pay a hefty premium for the liquid cooling integration on this card and it's 1 750 a 150 dollar markup over the founders of Edition or the base level 40 90s but 150 bucks compared to say the gigabyte card over here which is 1700 or for example some of the Asus cards that are going for 1800 or 2000 is a nice indicator to me relatively speaking of course that this card isn't insanely overpriced thanks to the water cooling integration and it is the same price over on NewEgg as well although they're both sold out aha here's a nice exploded view of the pump cooler combo the copper plate that is going to cool the GPU as well as the memory and actually have a point of criticism here that I'm going to get to in just a moment when we get to the temperatures but also a point of criticism for myself you might note that I'm not disassembling these cards today like I said I'm doing a follow-up video so if you guys have comments for me let me know in the comment section whether you find a lot of value in the card teardowns or if looking at the design here on the manufacturer website is okay with you I have a feeling I know what your answer is going to be but I'm on a bit of a time crunch this week also you might know with my overclocking I did not increase the voltage although that is something that you can do so overclocks with these cards could push a little bit higher than I've shown you today that said here's a look at the microfin Copper base extra copper pieces along the side here that engage with the vram and like the gigabyte card and honestly pretty much all cards these days the fan won't spin if the GPU is not hot I'm actually glad that MSI chose to use an active fan on the card itself to cool off the power delivery components but there are of course two 120 millimeter fans on the radiator in their MSI Meg silent Gale p12 fans and a few other notes on features like braided PVC tubes which are decently long and I would say pretty flexible too as far as the bit of use that I've been doing with it and a couple notes on the power delivery components here Advanced circuit layout with premium component tree not to put too fine a point on it and yes again we've got that gaming and Silent dual V bios setup right out of the box I almost forgot to measure this card measuring from the bracket it is actually just shy of 11 inches long so again in terms of compatibility with cases especially maybe smaller cases you might have an easier time integrating this card versus one of the cards that are 13 inches long or longer however you also need to have space for this 240 millimeter radiator and I will say that this red gets quite hot while this card is in use I can feel it just emanating heat from the outside so I wouldn't put this as an intake in a case because you'll be dumping all that heat into your case and affecting the temperature of other components like your CPU and memory in terms of gaming performance while running cyberpunk 2077 with the same settings as the gigabyte card we had a typical fan speed after a 15 to 20 minute test of about 37 percent that's 1300 to 1400 RPMs as measured by Hardware info and the GP clock was running at 2745 megahertz maybe peaking at 2775 megahertz GPU attempts were nice and cool thanks to the liquid cooler about 55 to 58 degrees Celsius roughly 10 degrees lower than the gigabyte card but the memory temp was not looking quite so good it was actually hitting 86 degrees Celsius so we'll keep an eye on that 40 to 45 frames per second Ray traced Ultra 4K gaming here and the GP few power draw was around 430 to 435 Watts from there I dialed in an overclock once again 80 fan speed which was a pretty significant increase over what it was running at at stock the power limit on this card only goes up to 110 so that was slightly disappointing I couldn't Crank It Up to 133 to get to the full 600 watt power limit that the 12 VH power connector provides did plus 205 on the core clock leading to a 2830 megahertz boost clock and plus 1315 on the memory which put it at 1477 megahertz again I use those settings to run 3dmark in the integrated Benchmark in cyberpunk and then when I tried to do the lengthier test I ran into a little bit of instability so again I dialed it back just slightly to plus 200 on the core and plus 1300 on the memory here is the ray traced Ultra performance with that overclocked dialed in we were hitting about 3015 megahertz clock speed on the GPU about 490 to 500 watts in terms of GPU power draw and getting about 45 to 52 frames per second the GPU was at 51 to 55 degrees Celsius so it actually cooled up alphabet thanks to increasing those fan speeds but the memory again was running a little bit warmer than I would like 78 to 80 degrees Celsius is just fine in terms of how hot gddr6x memory can get and can run at comfortably it's just notably warmer than the gigabyte card and the founders Edition finally once again switched over to dlss balance mode here the clock speed remained the same at about 3050 megahertz GPU power went down yet again 440 to 460 watts and the frame rate went up not quite as much as with the gigabyte card I was getting about 75 to 90 FPS the GPU temperature was 50 to 53 degrees Celsius and the memory again cooled off just a little bit down to 76 degrees and now for some side-by-side comparisons along with the founders Edition I did do an overclock setting with the founders Edition card as well at stock the founders Edition typically runs at a fan speed of about 46 percent or 1500 RPMs for the overclock I cranked that up to 70 fan speed 133 power limit plus 375 on the core Clock Plus 1400 on the memory clock 2795 megahertz boost 1480 88 megahertz on the memory and you can see those clock speed results from the overclocks and the stock settings right here the founders Edition hit 3045 megahertz Peak clock but it was running at about 3015 megahertz on average during the gaming test and here are the results from those in terms of temperatures and if you're looking at these and thinking Paul why are your overclocked temperatures lower than your not overclocked temperatures remember the first thing you will often do when you're overclocking a graphics card is increase the fan speed to lower temperatures and get yourself higher clock speeds and I think in particular since I wasn't adding any more voltage The increased fan speeds was resulting in lower temperatures overall while I was also getting more performance of course it also resulted in a little bit more noise but whether you're looking at the stock or the overclocked numbers you can see that both the gigabyte card and the MSI card are running cooler specifically if you're looking at the GPU temperatures it was really just the MSI liquid X's memory temperatures that were a little bit warm for my taste that said 86 to 88 degrees Celsius is still well within the operating range for gddr6x memory and it's definitely not getting up to 95 500 or 105 or Beyond which is what a lot of the RTX 3090 Founders edition cards were notorious for doing here's a look at Power draw numbers and you can see that there is a slight creep up in terms of power draw when it comes to the gigabyte and the MSI cards remember that the MSI card is running a pump as well as larger size fans so that's probably where the stock power draw increase is coming from but I did see more than a 100 watt increase in the gigabyte and Founders edition cards when I overclocked not quite so much with the MSI card but this is part of the reason why the cards ship at the clock speeds that they do they could run a little bit faster but there's a big trade-off in terms of power draw and then eventually temperatures so that's why they typically ship with more conservative clock speeds here's a look at Fan noise and we're not looking at stock versus overclocked I just set the fans to a fixed forty percent seventy percent and 100 fan speed please bear in mind that my office here is actually not the best environment for testing audio the noise floor is a little bit loud at about 41 DBA so I actually wasn't able to get readings for 40 fan speeds for for either the gigabyte or the MSI cards Founder's Edition got up to 46.2 DBA at 40 speed the gigabyte RTX 4090 gaming OC was actually the quietest card that I tested based on these parameters so good job gigabyte on the design of your card and the choice of your fans finally here's 3dmark time spy extreme just to show the difference in performance when I did the overclock versus not overclock as well as stock performance and you can see a slight variance here if you're looking at the non-overclocked numbers it is good to know at least that the gigabyte card scores a little bit more right out of the box and then the MSI card outperforms that even a little bit more which I was kind of expecting since it is a card with a liquid cooler attached that said when overclocked the Gap narrowed between all the cards they all broke 19 000 in terms of graphic score the MSI card still won with the 19194 but we're only looking at less than a 200 point gap between all three cards finally here's cyberpunk 2077 running at 4K this is what the ultra preset but with Ray tracing and dlss turned off so we can get raw comparative numbers and here again we have see a slight performance Advantage for the MSI card at stock and again maybe a frame or two more from the gigabyte card and then the MSI card when we're running with those overclock settings so here's where you make the real world decision is it worth it to have an extra 100 plus watts of power draw for a difference of maybe three or four FPS in actual gaming performance so those are my test results for these three cards and now to summarize I think the founders Edition is actually a very tough card to beat and as a lot of people have been pointing out Nvidia is making it more and more challenging for their add-in board Partners to stand out with their card designs because of what they've been doing with the founders Edition now if Nvidia was still charging a premium for the founders Edition like they did when they first introduced it however many generations ago that was then it would be easier for board Partners to stand out offering a value proposition with their sort of entry-level 1600-ish dollar cards in this instance but since the founders Edition also cost sixteen hundred dollars we have to decide if a 100 150 or or two hundred dollars or more price premium is worth it over the founders Edition and I would say it's probably not but you're probably right now at least dealing with more of a situation where you can't get this card and so you're maybe looking for others that are out there so that is my number one point of analysis that I'm coming away from this video with with all due respect and apologies to MSI and gigabyte that said if we're ignoring that value proposition question and we're just judging these based on performance you are getting slightly more performance in terms of thermals and in terms of noise generation with the gigabyte card and the MSI card neither card stood out significantly in terms of overclocking performance which was kind of expected like I said the gpus inside all of these cards are all going to operate within some variants of one another and it's kind of luck of the draw in terms of if you get a good overclocking chip or not but I do appreciate the actual functional value add-ons that these cards are bringing even if that mostly boils down to a dual V bios switch so between these two cards again if we're ignoring the bargain priced sixteen hundred dollar Founders Edition I think the gigabyte card does a great job of well taking up a lot of space but actually making use of that space by having a big cooler that does a very effective job while also pairing it with fans that can move a lot of air and keep the temperatures down even if they are spinning at a higher percentage RPM out of the gate and yes again it gets bonus points for being a little bit cooler a little bit quieter than the founders Edition the MSI card here I think is a little bit more Niche just because of the liquid cooling aspect it is running cooler on the GPU but hotter on the memory and it does have the prospect of being able to fit in some cases or some builds that some other cards simply cannot simply because it is a two slot design with a smaller card itself but of course you got to have room for the cooler too now the one thing that stood out to me while I was testing this card that I don't have an answer for you guys on yet is like I said this radiator gets really really hot when it's under use and I've had issues in the past with all one cooler pumps failing when the liquid temperature runs too hot for too long so so I reached out to MSI to ask them if there's any way to monitor the liquid temperature in this Loop to sort of keep an eye on that especially if you're doing lengthy extended gaming sessions I didn't give them a whole lot of time but if they provided a response I'll post something on the screen right now but I think that is all that I have to say about these cards right now but as I mentioned at the beginning of this video I will be coming back with another RTX 4090 testing video to test the Asus card and the colorful Eye game Vulcan so if you guys have any suggestions or feedback for me for that video or if there's anything you'd like me to revisit for these cards since I'll be showing performance comparisons there then do leave those in the comments section Down Below in the meantime I'll post links to these cards in the description they're probably still sold out but hopefully there's more of them coming back into stock soon but also down there I'll post a link to my store at paulsharbor.net where you can help support my channel by buying yourself some super awesome merch it's all very high quality and you can also check out my new 8-bit designs which are super cool if you guys enjoyed this video definitely hit the thumbs up button on your way out and let me know and also of course comments in the comment section down below are always appreciated thanks again for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 184,914

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, RTX 4090 review, rtx 4090, nvidia rtx 4090, nvidia, gpu, graphics card, launch, benchmarks, 1920x1080, 4K, 3840x2160, Cyberpunk 2077, dx12, 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, ray tracing, MSI RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X, Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC, rtx 4090 water cooled, rtx 4090 liquid cooled, air cooling vs water cooling, rtx 4090 air vs water, temperature, noise, sound level, acoustics, overclocking, OCing

Id: V0dwETxlb-g

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/AffectionateSir2462]

Those vram temps on the Suprim Liquid are concerning, and this isnt the only review showing 80°+ for vram. Might not be worth it to deal with the extra complications of liquid cooling and higher price just for a 1% at most performance gain and cooler core temps if the vram is going to be weirdly higher.