MSI recently launched its new RTX 5090 Lightning Z GPU, priced at a cheekily ridiculous $5,090 and aimed at extreme overclockers. That means overclocking for achieving world records, not just unlocking extra performance. As such, YouTuber Alva Jonatahan — whose escapades we've covered before — accepted the challenge and pushed this card to its absolute limits, and apparently past those, since it ended up dying in a sudden moment of thermal shock that cracked the GPU.
The RTX 5090 Lightning Z is so special that it broke world records before even launching officially. The GPU features dual 12V-2x6 connectors with a maximum power limit of 1000W — 600W per connector — made possible by a 40-phase VRM. There's also a special 2,500W XOC BIOS for overclockers, along with a massive 8-inch screen in place of the top backplate for displaying telemetry data.
Anyhow, Jonathan started with a modest OC pushing the card to 3.25 GHz at 1.05V, where it was already consuming over 700W. In 3DMark's Port Royal, this GPU with an 800W power limit achieved 43,112 points, beating the previous high of 40-41K points that MSI's RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid scored. Those numbers are already significantly higher than the typical 36-37K points a regular 5090 gets.
In this run, the GPU maxed out at 772W with pretty balanced load distribution between the two 16-pin power connectors. But since this card is meant for much more, Jonathan took it to the labs of ARX (arxidmedia), who let him run rampant with cooling experiments. Right away, the team jumped to liquid nitrogen and learned that keeping this beast under control is difficult even with LN2.
The actual heatsink making contact with the core was at -40 degrees Celsius, while the GPU was still at positive temps and kept rising to up to 9 degrees under full load. The card consumed over 1,000W at this point at 1.12 volts with 3.42 GHz boost clocks. It's a real challenge to maintain a high voltage and high clock with liquid nitrogen, as the safe operating range is between 0 and 15 degrees here.
In one of the runs, the 5090 hit 21 degrees and immediately crashed, but the GPUPI benchmark was a lot more forgiving, where Jonathan was able to hit 3.6 GHz at around 0 degrees. The team settled at 3.5 GHz as the sweet spot for now and was able to break the world record for the highest HWBot score for GPU compute in Geekbench 5. They scored 683,433 points, and the record still holds.
Now, it was time to move on to tackle other world records, but this is the point where things went south. Jonathan and team moved to the 2,500W XOC BIOS, but they had an earlier revision of it, which pushed too much voltage at once to the GPU and, as a result, one of the samples ended up dying. The core was visibly cracked — likely from sudden thermal shock.
Only 1.2V killed this 5090, which is fine for negative temps on liquid nitrogen, but incredibly dangerous at ambient temps around 25 degrees. The core, therefore, cracked because of a temperature imbalance where one part of it was cold while another had transformed into a hotspot. Anyhow, that's roughly $5,000 down the drain, but Jonathan has four more samples to resume testing.
Speaking of which, the overclocker did not manage to break any other world record, such as 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme. A better, more securely mounted cooler is required to continue with the remaining PCBs; Jonathan says at the end of the video that he might try a regular retail BIOS that's more stable, too. As for the dead 5090, it can technically be revived with a donor core since the rest of the componentry is intact.
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