Overclocker destroys $5,000 MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z with 2,500W BIOS

Top-level overclocking pushes PC hardware into scenarios it's never expected to experience. One exception is MSI's new $5000 RTX 5090 Lightning Z graphics card, sporting two 600 W 12V-2x6 connectors, 40-phase VRMs, and even an option to use a special BIOS that pushes the card's limit to a dizzy 2,500 W.

In a YouTube video Jonathan shared tests on multiple early samples sent by MSI. Where a standard GeForce RTX 5090 has a power limit of 575 W, MSI's model adds 800 W (OC) and 1,000 W (Extreme) modes and is water-cooled as standard with a 360 mm radiator. Jonathan's samples arrived without that cooler because for serious overclocking it's liquid nitrogen or nothing; early attempts topped the HWBot charts with a Geekbench 5 GPU Compute score of 683,433.

Switching to MSI's 2,500 W XOC BIOS, however, ended badly: the GPU cracked apart while just starting up at room temperature. The XOC BIOS uses a default voltage of 1.2 volts, which is well over what the chip normally deals with.

msi, rtx 5090, lightning z, 2,500w bios, xoc bios, overclocking, liquid nitrogen, geekbench 5, 40-phase vrm, 1.2 volts