MSI has shown off new cooling and power tricks for future Nvidia RTX graphics cards.
The outfit has said that since the company is not expecting a major gamer GPU launch this year, it used the gap to show what might land on future Nvidia RTX cards and what it will have to come up with to match.
MSI said that it is working on three main areas for its next designs: cooling, power delivery and the PCB. The cooling work includes new fans, heat pipes, thermal pads and baseplates, all dressed up as an advanced thermal architecture. The fan design uses ultra-thin metal blades rather than the usual plastic jobs.
MSI says the seven-blade all-metal design can deliver up to 40 per cent better airflow. The trick is a high-rigidity metal structure packed into a 0.8mm blade, which should resist deformation at higher speeds.
Thinner blades give more effective airflow area, while wider paths reduce resistance during high-speed operation.
MSI is also working on advanced spiral-groove heat pipes. These increase contact area compared with conventional heat pipes, which should help shift heat away from the GPU more efficiently.
The company has added diamond-composite thermal pads for memory modules to improve heat dissipation. There is also a diamond-copper composite baseplate, with a diamond-copper layer stacked between two copper layers.
MSI says this creates a high-conductivity path from the GPU to the heatsink. All these parts come together in a fully integrated cooling module.
One early design was shown as a next-generation Gaming Trio graphics card. MSI displayed it on an existing RTX 5090 32GB GPU, although it remains a prototype rather than a finished retail card.
The final version is expected to arrive with future Nvidia GPUs, so for now, it is more engineering peep show than shopping list.
MSI is bringing its Safeguard technology directly to high-end graphics cards. The feature first appeared on the company’s MPG power supply line.
The same protection and control, handled through software and hardware, will now work from the 16-pin connector on the graphics card. That means users will not need a compatible PSU to get the feature working.
MSI is still validating the technology with more power supplies and is expected to give it a new name. The company is also adding server-grade reusable fuses, called eFuse, to future GPUs. These are designed to protect the card from electrical damage using an internal gate-based reset mechanism.
The company says the fuses are resettable and reusable, with a short-circuit response of about 200ns. That should help long-term reliability, although anyone who has watched 16-pin connector drama will know reassurance is doing plenty of work here.
MSI showed the design on its RTX 5090 SUPRIM Safeguard card. As with the cooling module, these technologies are intended for future graphics cards rather than the shelves today.
It all points to GPU makers preparing for more power, more heat and more expensive lumps of hardware that need not cook themselves while running the next AI-slathered benchmark.