Overclocker Builds Copper Water Block for Nvidia RTX 5090

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is here, more or less, and it has already taken the crown for the world’s fastest consumer GPU. As Nvidia turns its attention to releasing its midrange RTX 5070 Ti and 5070 GPUs, power users are devising ways to cool the graphics processor and push it to even faster speeds. One of those people is overclocker Der8auer, who built a custom copper water block specifically for the RTX 5090. Spoiler alert: it reduced the GPU temp by 30°.

As Der8auer points out at the beginning of the video, there’s no question that the RTX 5090 can be water-cooled. The question he set out to answer was: How hard is it to disassemble the card and mount a water block? And would a typical water block customer be able to attach one? Der8auer records himself taking apart the card and adding the water block, which turns out to be a complicated process. He ends up concluding, “It is difficult, but it’s possible.”

The biggest issue is getting the original heatsink out of its frame, although der8uaer suggested a way for other users to make that process easier. He used a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, which is the card Nvidia sells in limited quantities when a new GPU launches. As Tom’s Hardware points out, Der8auer ended up having to build his copper cooler to the same size as the card’s default cooler to ensure that it fit properly with the short display cable. That’s the challenge with customizing PC hardware, which generally isn’t built with modding in mind.

Still, the block’s bulky size didn’t stop it from dramatically lowering the die’s temperature. The GPU went from 73.8° Celsius to 43.8°, making for a 30° drop. The memory dropped 38° Celsius. So, if you’re itching to tear apart your wildly expensive (and hard to get, at least for now) graphics card, now you know it’s doable. And, if you plan to overclock the RTX 5090, it’s probably a necessity. How much extra speed can be wrung from the RTX 5090 remains to be seen, but we have no doubt overclockers are working on finding out now. That is, if they can get ahold of one of the cards.