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Overclocking on the MSI Suprim Liquid X proved somewhat limiting, compared to the Founders Edition and Asus ROG Strix cards. The power limit in MSI Afterburner maxed out at 110%, while the GPU overclock became unstable beyond +180 MHz and the GDDR6X memory could only hit +800 MHz — even with an aggressive fan speed curve.
We suspect if we could get more voltage to the GPU, we could break 3.0 GHz, but there aren't any utilities that allow increasing the 4090 voltage levels right now. Overall, out of the three 4090 cards tested so far, the MSI had the lowest overclocks, probably mostly due to the VRAM. The silicon lottery almost certainly plays a role, however, so other Suprim Liquid X cards might fare better.
We also wanted to check underclocking, or at least see what would happen with a lower power limit in place. Der8auer has a video suggesting Nvidia didn't need to go with a massive 450W TBP power limit, and that in some cases you can get 90–95% of the performance while only using 60–70% of the power. We set our power limit on the MSI card to 65% and ran through our DXR benchmarks.
You'll see these as "RTX 4090 MSI UC" in the charts. Needless to say, dropping the power limit by 35% also reduced performance quite a bit, at least in heavy ray tracing games. Basically, for DXR we measured an average performance loss of 20%. That's still higher efficiency, but it's a questionable approach to buy a card like the 4090 only to reduce it's performance.
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