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Enthusiast zone: Famed hardware overclocker Roman "der8auer" Hartung has modified an RTX 5090 Lightning graphics card with a custom watercooling setup, swapping the original AIO for a stainless-steel fitted waterblock. The conversion kit reportedly lowered operating temperatures by around 11 degrees Celsius at 800W under full load.
The modified waterblock, once hooked up to the PC's custom water-cooling loop, brought the operating temperature of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z down from 64 degrees to around 53 degrees. That result was measured at 800W under full load, though der8auer believes it would hold up similarly even in the card's 1000W Extreme Performance mode.
The modification went smoothly for the most part, but the team still ran into a few unwanted surprises, including an aluminum plate coated with electroless nickel inside the original AIO. While electroless plating is specifically designed to prevent corrosion, Hartung and his team replaced it with a PVD-coated stainless steel plate, since aluminum can still corrode in an open water-cooling loop despite the coating.
