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The overclocking race is on Tony YuGeneral Manager of Asus China, reviewed RTX 5090D in depth and gave us our first glimpse of its overload potential. Under liquid nitrogen and a handful of board modifications, the RTX 5090D successfully took down several key configurations in the 3DMark suite. Yu also captured nice shots of Samsung’s 30 Gbps GDDR7 ICs and the GB202 chip that powers the RTX 5090D, revealing Blackwell’s underlying architecture.
The China-exclusive RTX 5090D has similar paper specifications to its global counterpart. However, Nvidia has imposed some artificial restrictions to meet US export restrictions and limit crypto-mining and AI performance at the executive level. As a result, the RTX 5090D is limited to 2,375 AI TOPS (FP4), down from 3,352 on the base RTX 5090.
The test bench used for the overclock features the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090D, paired with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on top of the Asus ROG X870E Hero motherboard along with a DDR5-6000 CL30 memory kit from G.Skill. Tony began the overclock by physically modifying the board, likely a shunt mod, and coating the PCB with a protective anti-condensation coating.
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| GPU name | Time Spy Extreme | Fire Strike Ultra | Port Royal |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090D OC | 30,270 | 36,431 | 43,372 |
| Stock RTX 5090D | 26,398 | 33,554 | 37263 |
| RTX 5090 | 26,234 | 33,054 | 36626 |
| RTX 4090 | 19661 | 25,225 | 26730 |
| RTX 4090D | 17263 | 22,497 | 22,390 |
| RTX 4080 Super | 13,866 | 17667 | 18,129 |
After mounting and filling the pot with liquid nitrogen, the RTX 5090D clocked in at an impressive 3.4 GHz with a memory speed of 34 Gbps (17 GHz). This overclock allowed the RTX 5090D to breach the 3DMark Hall of Fame rankings and break world records in STANDARDS such as Port Royal, Fire Strike Ultra and Wild Life Extreme. Compared to stock, liquid nitrogen makes the RTX 5090D up to 16% faster than stock, although such extreme overclocking is not practical for everyday use.
The RTX 5090D outperformed a pair RTX 3090 Ti on the Port Royal standard and destroyed a quadrilateral configuration of GTX 1080 Ti in the fire strike.
High-resolution recordings of the GB202 chip allow us to visualize what a chip near the lattice size limit looks like. For context, the GB202 die measures approx 744 mm2The largest consumer GPU since the TU102 (Turing). Along with a 24% increase in cover size, the total package size of the GB202, which includes the metal frame and other components, is also larger than the AD102 in RTX 4090.
The shared images reveal intricate details of how Blackwell structures the fundamental building blocks of the RTX 5090. Tony also placed a small Samsung GDDR7 module for comparison, 16 of which surround the RTX 5090’s GB202 die. We can expect a wave of new records and world records.
