MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z: Costs 5K, Pulls Over 1000W

1. Introduction2. Meet the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z3. Testing Methodology4. Game Benchmarks5. Clock Speed6. GPU Temperatures7. Acoustics8. Noise-Normalised Temperatures9. Power Draw and Efficiency10. Overclocking11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

For our manual overclocking tests, we used MSI Afterburner. We were able to add 150MHz to the GPU core and 2000MHz to the memory. All OC testing was done using the Extreme BIOS which has a maximum power limit of 1000W.

Lastly, we also tried manual overclocking, but found there was little headroom left considering the Lightning Z already ran at 3GHz out of the box. I added 150MHz to the GPU and 2000MHz to the memory, which saw some improvement in certain titles, but next to nothing in Cyberpunk 2077.

I think the extreme overclockers will definitely want to use MSI’s custom 2500W BIOS (!) which is available on request, and even voids your warranty, but that was clearly beyond the scope of this analysis!

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