Introduction
On January twenty third, 2025 we reviewed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition video card, with availability on January thirtieth, for a retail MSRP of $1,999. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition performed well, and we overall experienced a 30-35% performance uplift on average, over the previous generation GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. Now the query stays, can or not it’s overclocked? When you overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Foundes Edition how much performance are you able to squeeze out of it? That is strictly what we aim to do on this NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Overclocked review.
When you are unfamiliar with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 please take a look at our GeForce RTX 5090 FE review, we focused on the Founders Edition model, and that’s what we will likely be overclocking today. Here’s a quick run-down of the GeForce RTX 5090 specifications in case you missed them. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 utilizes the GB202 GPU based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and is the successor to the GeForce RTX 4090 based on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture. The GB202 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 relies on the TSMC 4nm 4N NVIDIA custom process, which is similar because the previous generation Ada Lovelace. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 supports a PCI-Express 5.0 (Gen5) interface.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 consists of 11 GPCs, 85 TPCs, and 170 SMs with 128 CUDA Cores per SM. Whenever you add all this up, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 has 21,760 CUDA Cores, 680 fifth Gen Tensor Cores, 170 4th Gen RT Cores, 176 ROPs and 680 Texture Units. The L1 Data Cache/Shared memory size is 21760KB, and the L2 cache size is 98304KB. The GPU Boost Clock is ready at 2407MHz. Memory consists of 32GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit memory bus at 28Gbps giving it 1.792GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TGP (Total Graphics Power) is 575W.
How To Overclock GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition
With the intention to overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, we want software, and that is where MSI stepped as much as the plate and sent us a brand new beta version of MSI Afterburner that fully supports the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. With this new edition of MSI Afterburner and this latest UI design, we were in a position to control the Power Limit, Core frequency, Memory frequency, Fan Speed, and even Voltage.
Within the above screenshot, one can find our highest-stable overclock on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition. You’ll be able to see that the Power Limit was in a position to be pushed up only 4% from 100%, at 575W TDP this makes the brand new overclocked TDP a maximum of 600W. 600W just so happens to be the utmost power delivery of the 12VHPWR cable itself, so we are actually at the utmost potential of the cable, without power transients. We also set the fan speed to 80% to make sure the perfect overclock, this increased the noise level quite a bit, nevertheless it ensured we weren’t held back thermally for our GPU or memory frequency.
In our overclocking, we found that keeping the Voltage at default was the perfect, to keep up an overclock that didn’t exceed the TDP and throttle clock speed. It was clear that more Voltage would have allowed the next clock frequency, but we actually encountered an interesting thing after we pushed up the Voltage. Pushing up the Voltage to 100% actually caused the video card to lock its frequency at just 600-900MHz. It could possibly be a bug, or it could possibly be a preventive measure so that you simply don’t exceed dangerous voltages and power spikes. At any rate, to clear this issue out we actually needed to turn the pc completely off, to reset it back to normal frequency. Subsequently, we didn’t raise the Voltage for this overclock, and albeit with the ability and further heat, it just didn’t seem value it to extend Voltage to extreme levels to start with.
Our highest stable overclock had the Core frequency set at +270 and the Memory frequency at +1500MHz. You will note what this leads to on the graph below, when it comes to real-world gaming frequency. We were in a position to push the Core frequency slider as much as +300 briefly, some games could play for a couple of minutes, and a few others locked up instantly, but at +300 we did see the frequency exceed 3GHz, nevertheless it was not sustainable without more Voltage. Nevertheless, we do feel that with more Voltage, and more power, 3GHz+ is perhaps possible, but you actually need good cooling, more power, and more Voltage to do it.
On the memory side of things, the default memory clock frequency is 28Gbps, and with +1500 this increased the memory to 31Gbps. On this 512-bit memory bus, the default memory bandwidth is 1792 GB/sec, with the memory overclocked to 31Gbps the brand new overclocked memory bandwidth is 1984 GB/sec, a rise of 11% more memory bandwidth. That’s pretty amazing, to almost hit 2Gbps on memory bandwidth, and truly, 32Gbps could also be stable, but the ability demand is already exceeding the TDP at just 4% more power, so it could find yourself throttling the clock frequency overall.
Bear in mind that the GeForce RTX 5090 has a GPU Boost clock of 2407MHz, nevertheless, because of NVIDIA Boost technologies the actual gaming frequency boost is higher than this given power, TDP, and thermal headroom. In our GeForce RTX 5090 FE review, we checked out the GPU Frequency at default. We found that the GPU frequency can vary depending on the sport load.
For instance, if the load may be very heavy, bottlenecking performance or the GPU, the frequency will operate lower into the 2500MHz range, between 2460-2550MHz. Nevertheless, in a lighter load, where the GPU can stretch its legs, it might boost all the way in which up to only above 2700MHz as our graph showed us. For our overclocking today, we utilized that higher-end end of the spectrum, 2700MHz, as our base default clock speed we were working from. The goal of the overclock was to then ensure a stable overclock above 2700MHz, which we were in a position to do, thus truly overclocking the cardboard.
With our highest stable overclock of +270 on the Core frequency, and 4% more power, you possibly can see that the clock frequency while gaming has increased. We are actually getting frequencies between 2910MHz-3000MHz, though the 3000MHz peaks are short-lived. The actual average of the overclock frequency is 2968MHz. Subsequently, if we compare the overclock (2968MHz) to the default GPU Boost of 2715MHz the overclock provides a 9% GPU clock frequency overclock or 253MHz overclock on average.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition Overclocking final overclock is: 2968MHz/31Gbps (core/mem).
