A major drawback of the exceptionally powerful GeForce RTX 5090 is the high power demands of its large GB202 chip. Even when equipped with a premium air cooler, the card still requires robust system cooling to handle its nearly 600W heat output. However, AiO liquid cooling models can offer even better thermal performance, thanks to their larger radiators with three 120mm fans, which expel hot air directly outside the case.
Metro Exodus EE (quiet)
The final set comes from the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark with Extreme settings at a 3840 × 2160 resolution. Here, too, the chip load fluctuates – particularly toward the end of the loop, where the card’s power draw drops by around 80 W, despite monitoring indicating that the GPU should be under full load.
The average chip clock speed hovered around 2801 MHz, and while there was a drop of just under 20 MHz, it had no measurable impact on performance.
Just as in Performance mode, Quiet mode also shows a drop in power consumption from the 600 W limit down to 520 W by the end of the loop.
Chip and memory temperatures in Quiet mode are a few degrees higher, but few users will likely tolerate the noticeably louder cooling just for this – especially since the Founders Edition already sees chip temperatures exceeding 80 °C.
The load curve is once again most evident in the card’s fan speeds, while the radiator fans show only minor fluctuations.
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