x/nxpc · 
You ever look at your gaming rig and think, "yeah, it's fast — but what if I poured liquid nitrogen on it and watched it suck down more power than a space heater?" No? Just me and a guy named Splave, then.
Thursday is Extreme Gaming PC day at NXPC, and this week we're going full halo-tier. We're talking the RTX 5090, custom water loops, and a world-record 3DMark Port Royal run that involved a five-pound copper pot, a $4,500+ graphics card, and a whole lot of patience. Let's get into it.
At the top of NVIDIA's Blackwell stack sits the GeForce RTX 5090, and the reference numbers alone should tell you this isn't a card you casually toss in a mid-tower:
| Spec | RTX 5090 (Reference) |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Blackwell (GB202) |
| CUDA Cores | 21,760 |
| VRAM | 32GB GDDR7 |
| Memory Bus | 512-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1,792 GB/s |
| Boost Clock | ~2.41 GHz (2,407 MHz) |
| TGP | 575W |
| Display Output | 4K @ 480Hz / 8K @ 120Hz (DSC) |
| Recommended PSU | 1,000W (more for heavy OC) |
| Max GPU Temp | 90°C |
That's a 32GB card on a 512-bit bus pushing nearly 1.8 TB/s of bandwidth. Compared to the outgoing RTX 4090, reviewers consistently land it at roughly 27–35% faster at 4K, with ray-traced titles showing up to a 50% uplift. It's the first GPU that genuinely makes 4K high-refresh feel default, not aspirational.
Here's the part that keeps reviewers honest. The 5090 is a monster, but "4K native, maxed out, ray tracing on" is still the wall everyone hits:
| Game | Settings | FPS |
|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 4K Psycho, RT on, DLSS off | 32 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 4K Psycho, RT on, DLSS + Frame Gen | 239 |
| Alan Wake 2 | 4K High | 93 |
| Black Myth: Wukong | 4K Ultra, RT on, DLSS off | 31 |
| Black Myth: Wukong | 4K Ultra, no RT | 84 |
See that jump from 32 to 239 FPS in Cyberpunk? That's DLSS 4 + Multi-Frame Generation doing the heavy lifting. It's the single most important feature on the card — more than the raw CUDA core count. Path tracing at native 4K is still a slideshow on any consumer GPU; the 5090's party trick is making it playable through intelligent upscaling and frame generation. For an extreme build, this is where the money actually goes: not just raw raster, but the software stack that feeds it.
Now for the fun part. Professional overclocker Allen "Splave" Golibersuch (of Splave's Cave on Tom's Hardware) spent time with an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 and a special non-public BIOS that unlocks the power limit. Here's what happened:
But here's the twist: the RTX 5090 die hates being cold. At around -10°C to -20°C, the card hits a "cold bug" — black screen, system hang, and you wait until it's back above 0°C to boot. Splave's exact words: the card "starts misbehaving." He even wished for a "Kingpin" figure to finesse NVIDIA into fixing it, the way the legendary overclocker used to.
The takeaway for mortals? The standard OC BIOS has plenty of headroom — many Astral cards run +2,000 MHz memory speeds on air, no LN2 required. But the truly absurd numbers require sub-ambient cooling and a BIOS you can't actually get.
If you're not going the liquid-nitrogen route (you're not), a custom loop is the sane way to keep a 5090-class card happy. The playbook:
KitGuru's February 2026 test put four Astral 5090 blocks head-to-head under a 30-minute 3DMark Speed Way stress run at 19–20°C ambient. That's the kind of sustained load that separates a show build from a daily-driver loop.
This is where the "extreme" part hurts the wallet. Live prices from Amazon on Thursday, August 13, 2026:
| Component | USD | CAD |
|---|---|---|
| ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC | $4,549.99 | $6,719.99 |
| ASUS ROG Astral LC 5090 (360mm AIO) | $5,699.97 | — |
| MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC | — | $6,769.99 |
| ZOTAC 5090 AMP Extreme Infinity | $4,699.00 | — |
| GIGABYTE 5090 WINDFORCE OC | $4,799.99 | — |
| GIGABYTE AORUS Master ICE 5090 | — | $6,499.00 |
| AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D | $569.00 | $799.98 |
| Corsair Hydro X XG5 Astral Block | — | $469.99 |
Let's do some quick math on the flagship pairing. The ASUS ROG Astral 5090 + Ryzen 9 9950X3D alone runs you roughly $5,119 USD before you've bought a motherboard, memory, storage, power supply, or a single radiator. In Canadian dollars, that same CPU+GPU combo is about $7,520 CAD. Add a full custom loop, a 1,000W+ PSU, and a case that actually fits a 3.8-slot card, and you're staring down a $6,000–$8,000 USD build without blinking.
And yes — the limited-edition stuff goes even higher. YouTuber PC Elegance built a $20,000 RTX 5090 Matrix setup, which is exactly the kind of "because we can" build Thursday is all about.
Pros:
Cons:
Should you buy it? If you're chasing 4K 240Hz or 8K, and money is genuinely no object, the 5090 is the only card that gets you there today. For everyone else — and Linus Tech Tips made this exact point in "Most People Should NOT Buy a 5090 (Even if you CAN)" — a 5080 or 4090-class card gets you 90% of the experience at a fraction of the price.
But that's not what Thursday is about. Thursday is about the ceiling — the 3.6GHz core clocks, the 1,000W power spikes, the five-pound copper pots, and the absurd joy of building a machine that has no reason to exist except that it can. And honestly? That's the best part of this hobby.
Prices are live as of Thursday, August 13, 2026 and subject to change. This is hardware enthusiasm — not financial advice, and definitely not a recommendation to pour LN2 on a $4,500 GPU.