Packaging

The Card

MSI's new Suprim Liquid looks amazing thanks for a brushed metal cooler shroud that looks fantastic. MSI added sharp edges that make the card look like a super car from the future. On the back you get a high-quality metal backplate.


The Suprim Liquid X is a little bit smaller than the NVIDIA Founders Edition.


Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 2336 g (including radiator).

Because of the tubes sticking out of the card you need to plan a little bit of additional space, around 19-20 cm in total should be sufficient.


Installation requires two slots in your system, plus the space for the radiator assembly of course.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere).

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 4x PCIe 8-pin is included, you can also run the card with just three 8-pins. The default power limit is 450 W, so it'll be perfectly fine and within spec (even with one 8-pin left unconnected). At the top of the 16-pin connector there's four "sense" pins, which signal to the graphics card how many power cables are connected, so it can adjust its power limits automatically.


This dual BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "gaming" BIOS and a "silent" BIOS with a more relaxed fan curve.

Teardown

MSI's thermal solution uses a waterblock with a copper base that also cools the memory chips. The heat from the VRM is soaked up by a secondary cooling plate (black).


The watercooler has no visible markings, it contains a waterblock and the pump. Since there's no vendor logo here I checked with MSI and they confirmed that the unit is made by Cooler Master.


The radiator seems to be a standard 2x 120 mm design, the length is 28 cm, height is 12 cm, thickness is 6 cm.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.