MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X Overclocking Guide
Wrap Up and Video
Overclocking has its place. Back when we had dark hair, and more of it, the performance of any hardware was relatively low, and therefore any improvement you could make was a larger percentage of the overall performance, and gave you a huge benefit. As times have moved on and PC hardware has grown ever more powerful, the gains you can make lessen. With the current thinking of the major brands being one of automatic overclocking – Turbo Boost, GPU Boost etc – then the products themselves do most of the clockspeed gaining automatically.
The RTX 4090 sits at the apex of powerful hardware. It is, frankly, hiliariously capable and in MSI Suprim X guise as good as you could hope. This naturally means that the kind of improvements you can get from a card which eats every game for breakfast and already averages the best part of 2.8 GHz GPU clock are slim. They are not remotely the kind of improvements you’d get from tweaking a GTX 750 Ti or similar. Running every single game at 4K with ray tracing and still not dipping below 60 FPS makes any improvement negligible.
That isn’t to say that we couldn’t squeeze more performance from our Suprim X. As we saw throughout our testing, even if it was a single frame or two, the combination of MSI Afterburner and the Suprim X dominated the graphs. Quite often the weak point in our test system was the processor. We wouldn’t imagine that a Ryzen 9 3950X would find itself short of breath, but here we are. Some games, mainly Ubisoft ones, are built on engines that just can’t be pushed faster than they are willing to go.
All of which means, obviously really but it bears putting down in black and white, that if you’re running a RTX 4090 and want to push the boat out, you need a system designed with equally class-leading components across the board, and even then be aware that some games respond better than others. Similarly as we saw when we pushed the peak clock speed higher and lost average clock speed and, thus, performance, chasing high peaks isn’t the best path to take.
Nonetheless MSI and their Suprim X deserve credit for producing a card that can happily run at nearly 3000 MHz all day long. Admittedly with the fans on full blast – perhaps watercooling will get you over that 3 GHz hump – but it is still a level that seemed unimaginable a couple of years ago. Right now the rewards don’t seem to be worth it, but it’s reassuring to know you’re futureproofed for a long time to come. After all, if Cyberpunk 2077 with all the bells and whistles on averages 132 FPS @ 4K, no games we know are on the horizon will test this setup harder than that.
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