NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 FE with a custom water block: GPU runs 25C cooler, GDDR7 is 30C cooler

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card has been tweaked by overclocker Der8auer, with a custom water block used, reducing GPU and GDDR7 memory temperatures by very impressive numbers.

Sure, you can buy a custom RTX 5090 with a pre-installed water block from the likes of ASUS, but NVIDIA has a mighty impressive PCB design and liquid metal on the GB202 GPU. Der8auer modded the RTX 5090 FE, disassembling it and then installing a custom water block.

The overclocker also checked the liquid metal on the card, using a spectroscope to work out that NVIDIA is using 10% thin, which is similar to Conductonaut (which is a Thermaly Grizzly product) but not as high-performance as their Extreme version, adds Der8auer.

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Der8auer said if the final version of his water block ever made it to market, it would use less copper than what was used to cool his RTX 5090 FE to make the cooler cheaper. Once the water block was installed onto the RTX 5090 FE, Der8auer used Thermal Grizzly's Kryonaut thermal paste for the GB202 GPU, and Thermal Putty Pro for the GDDR7 memory chips and VRMs.

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Now... onto the results: in some quick and dirty testing, Der8aur had a pretty awesome GPU temperature reduction of 30C (now running at 50C, compared to 75C at stock). The GDDR7 memory modules on the RTX 5090 FE had an even more impressive temperature reduction of 30C (now running at 60C, down from 90C at stock).

The GPU clock speed was hitting 2680MHz which is slightly higher than stock, with the temperature drops alone bloody impressive to see. It would be nice to see NVIDIA offer a Founders Edition card with a nice-and-tight dual-slot design like this, and while AIBs can do it, I do wonder what a balls-to-the-wall liquid-cooled Founders Edition graphics card could do.