The Nvidia RTX 5090 still stands tall as the king of gaming graphics cards, but of course, it doesn’t come cheap. However, what if you wanted to buy one that’s a lot more expensive, even more powerful, and more extreme in every way? Well, that’s what the ASUS ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 represents. Of course, we’ve already tested the RTX 5090 Founders Edition and the ASUS ASTRAL air-cooled version along with other variants from a variety of brands, so we won’t be re-covering old ground on the capabilities of the GPU core. However, we are going to find out if this insane liquid-cooling version offers much, if any, real benefit over more traditional RTX 5090 solutions.
ASUS RTX 5090 ASTRAL
With its hybrid cooling, it features a large fan on the GPU itself with a full-coverage copper plate for the GPU core, and most notably, pre-installed tubing that runs to a 360mm radiator, fitted with a trio of premium-quality ASUS RGB fans. There’s an attention to detail here, too, with a Phase-Change GPU thermal pad and a protective PCB coating to combat any moisture and debris issues. All small details that add up when trying to unlock maximum performance from what was already a very powerful graphics card.
As we all know, cooler temperatures on a graphics card can allow the card to run higher clock speeds and maintain its boost clocks for longer without overheating and throttling and this also gives more room to pump more raw power into the card, which ASUS has done with a suite of 80-amp MOSFETs for improved overclocking headroom.
So, on paper, the ROG Astral LC should be a strong performer, but as I said, it’s also considerably more expensive, and we’ll get into the price once we’ve seen how its performance holds up to the competition.
Features
- AIO Liquid Cooling System: The card is cooled by a liquid cooling solution featuring a 360mm radiator, full-coverage copper cold plate, and an integrated fan for efficient heat dissipation.
- Next-Gen Architecture: It’s built on the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture with 21,760 CUDA cores, 4th Gen RT Cores, and 5th Gen Tensor Cores.
- High-End Memory: It features 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM with a 512-bit memory bus, providing a high memory bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s.
- Overclocking and Power: The card is factory overclocked, with a boosted clock speed of up to 2610MHz, and has a power limit of 600W.
- Dual BIOS: Includes a dual BIOS for switching between Performance and Quiet modes.
- NVIDIA Features: Supports advanced technologies like NVIDIA DLSS 4, NVIDIA Reflex 2, and full ray tracing with neural rendering.
