A Closer Look
What the cooler gives us is an updated, premium shroud with three StormForce axial fans with a unique serrated design that helps to pull air in and push it across the large vapour chamber-based heatsink through use of seven flattened heatpipes, thus improving surface area and heat transfer.
The card uses a mix of materials across the shroud, which not only assists in the style department, but adds to the overall quality of the card and, in places, does assist in cooling, like the full metal backplate with airflow vents to help heat pass out of.
The aspect that helps cooling the most is the sheer size of the heatsink, which makes the card obscenely large at 359mm long, 150mm tall and 76mm thick, making it a 3.5-slot card and coming in at 2614g. It’s not the lightest card we’ve seen, but I do like that, as it gives us an extra element of quality through its precision-crafted design and craftsmanship.
Due to its weight, it does come with a support to eliminate GPU sag, but on a card of this calibre, I just expected something a little better, especially considering that it’s the same support that comes with MSI’s Ventus MSRP-based cards and competitor cards offer a more sturdy metal bracket that screws into the end of the card. It just feels like MSI skimped out a little on that front.
In typical fashion with cards at this price point, you do get some extra features such as RGB, but MSI have toned this down quite dramatically from the previous generation. Now we only have the SUPRIM logo at the front edge, SUPRIM wording along the side and two pulsating areas on the front of the card, which all by default glow white, though of course, you can control this to be any and all colours of the rainbow if you want. And what’s nice about this, is that it makes the card, straight out of the box, seem more grown up and mature, without restricting your own creative flair. What you will find is that while it looks nice horizontally mounted, if you’re all about that RGB life, then mounting the card vertically will look a lot better.
We also get a dual BIOS switch to take it from gaming mode, which is set as default, to silent mode, for those who want to prioritise noise levels, but this does nothing for the clock speeds, and instead, simply adjusts the fan curve to be less aggressive compared to gaming mode.
Compared to the previous generation of SUPRIM cards we’ve looked at, there’s definitely something about this lineup with improved design and cooler. It just feels better, and I know that’s a given as of course, you’d expect the newer iteration to be better than the last, but there’s a definite step up in direction here, and I’m liking it.
Connection-wise, as you’d expect, there are the three standard DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI, and for supplying the 360W of power that this baby is able to pull, we have a single 12V 2×6 power connector along the top. An 850W PSU is recommended to run this card, but for users looking to buy an RTX 5080 SUPRIM SOC, you’re likely rocking pretty high-end hardware, so may need a higher wattage unit depending on the rest of your system’s specs.
