Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X is the company's new flagship air-cooled graphics card; it also introduces the new Suprim brand extension denoting the highest grade of MSI engineering and performance tuning. Last week, we brought you our review of the RTX 3080 Suprim X and today, we have with us its bigger sibling. Actually, both the RTX 3080 Suprim X and RTX 3090 Suprim X are based on a nearly identical board design, but the silicon underneath—the mighty RTX 3090—and support for NVLink SLI is what's new. The Suprim X series is positioned a notch above the company's Gaming X Trio and likely a replacement for the company's Gaming Z brand, which probably had too many similarities in board design to the Gaming X to warrant a price increase. MSI is also giving its product stack a new class of graphics cards to compete against the likes of the EVGA air-cooled FTW3 Ultra. It's also taking a crack at NVIDIA's Founders Edition in the aesthetics department.

With the RTX 30-series "Ampere," NVIDIA reshaped the upper end of its GeForce GPU family. The RTX 3080 is designed to offer premium 4K UHD gaming with raytracing and is already being referred to as the company's flagship gaming graphics card. NVIDIA has been extensively comparing the RTX 3080 to the RTX 2080 Ti, which it convincingly beats. The new RTX 3090, on the other hand, is what NVIDIA is positioning as its new "halo" product with comparisons to the $2,500 TITAN RTX, while being $1,000 cheaper, starting at $1,500. Both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 share a common piece of silicon, with the RTX 3090 almost maxing it out, while the RTX 3080 is quite cut down.



The GeForce Ampere graphics architecture represents the 2nd generation of the company's RTX technology, which combines conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient-occlusion, and global-illumination, to radically improve realism in games. Processing these in real time requires fixed-function hardware as they're extremely taxing on programmable shaders. The GeForce Ampere architecture hence combines the new Ampere CUDA core, which can handle concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations, significantly increasing performance over past generations; the new 2nd generation RT core, which in addition to double the ray intersection and BVH performance over Turing RT cores offers new hardware to accelerate raytraced motion blur; and the 3rd generation Tensor core, which leverages the sparsity phenomenon in AI deep-learning neural networks to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude over the previous generation.

NVIDIA is equipping the RTX 3090 with a mammoth 24 GB of video memory and targets it at creators as well, not just gamers. Creators can pair it with NVIDIA's feature-rich GeForce Studio drivers, while gamers can go with GeForce Game Ready drivers. That said, the RTX 3090 isn't strictly a creator's card, either. NVIDIA is taking a stab at the new 8K resolution for gaming, which is four times the pixels of 4K and sixteen times Full HD—not an easy task even for today's GPUs. The company hence innovated the new 8K DLSS feature, which leverages AI super-resolution to bring higher fidelity gaming than previously thought possible, for 8K.

As we mentioned earlier, the RTX 3090 is based on the 8 nm "GA102" silicon, nearly maxing it out. All but one of the 42 TPCs (84 streaming multiprocessors) are enabled, resulting in a CUDA core count of 10,496, along with 328 Tensor cores, 82 RT cores, 328 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. To achieve 24 GB, the RTX 3090 maxes out the 384-bit wide memory bus on the "GA102" and uses the fastest 19.5 Gbps GDDR6X memory, which gives the card an astounding 940 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X is designed to give NVIDIA's RTX 3090 Founders Edition a run for its money in a beauty contest, with lavish use of brushed aluminium in the construction of the cooler shroud, perfect symmetry throughout the card, and sharp edges beautifully finished off with RGB LED elements. The amount of illumination on this card is similar to the Gaming X Trio, but more tastefully designed. The RTX 3090 Suprim X also features MSI's highest factory overclock for the RTX 3090, with the core ticking at 1860 MHz (vs. 1695 MHz reference and 1785 MHz on the Gaming X Trio). MSI is pricing the RTX 3090 Suprim X at $1,750, a $250 premium over the NVIDIA baseline pricing and $160 pricier than the RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio. In this review, we find out if it's worth spending the extra money on this card over the Gaming X Trio, or even NVIDIA's Founders Edition.

Packaging

The Card

The MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X is possibly the largest graphics card in the market, with dimensions and aesthetics that make the already large RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio look much smaller. A premium brushed aluminium shroud dominates much of the card, with cleverly designed cutouts for the vents and some sharp edges and RGB LED diffusers. The amount of RGB bling is about the same as for the Gaming X Trio, but somehow comes across as more subtle and classy. Both the RTX 3080 and 3090 Suprim X look identical.


Dimensions of the card are 33.5 x 14 cm. This is a very long card; please be aware of the dimensions, and check if it will fit your case.


See what I mean? The Suprim X is huge, noticeably bigger than the Gaming X Trio or even RTX 3090 FE. The two small cards on the left? Those are the RTX 3080 Founders Edition and Radeon RX 6800 XT—not so small at all.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on the Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default (silent) BIOS and a "gaming" BIOS, which runs a more aggressive fan curve for lower temperatures. Both BIOSes have idle fan stop. As you can see on page 30, the gaming BIOS runs slightly higher clocks.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, MSI sticks to the industry standard 8-pin PCIe power inputs, but there are three of these. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 525 W.


The GeForce RTX 3090 supports SLI and features a newer-generation NVLink bridge interface, which means you can't use your NVLink bridge from your Turing cards. Be warned that with Ampere, NVIDIA isn't supporting SLI as in implicit multi-GPU (SLI as you know it), but explicit multi-GPU that's developed and supported by game/application developers. With multi-GPU game support being pretty much non-existent, this basically means SLI is dead. Perhaps creative and 3D modeling applications that support explicit multi-GPU can benefit from SLI.

Teardown

The MSI Suprim X cooling solution for the RTX 3090 features two large aluminium fin stacks at both ends of seven square heat pipes, same as on the RTX 3080 Suprim. A mirror-finish, nickel-plated copper base pulls heat from the GPU, while a flattened heat pipe runs around this plate, pulling heat from the surrounding memory chips. Thermal pads for the memory make contact with both this heat pipe and the GPU base plate.


Here, you can see the square heatpipes—note how snugly they use the available space.


An L-shaped metal bit provides structural reinforcement for the card, counteracting PCB bending over time.


The backplate is made out of aluminium and features a groovy-looking, illuminated MSI Gaming logo ornament. This is the only difference in the cooler vs. the RTX 3080 Suprim X. Since there are memory chips on the back of the card, MSI added several thermal pads and two heatpipes that run along the length of the backplate to soak up some extra heat.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).