MSI's $5,000+ Lightning Z RTX 5090 has seen real-world tests and hit a whopping 1076 W power draw in Cyberpunk 2077

An MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Lightning Z graphics card on display at CES 2026 — (Image credit: Future)

MSI's Lighting Z RTX 5090 is seemingly very impressive. With AIO liquid cooling and a huge screen, MSI says it is "Built to sustain 1000W loads with absolute stability." I wouldn't know personally, as I'm a mere mortal and not one of the 1,300 lucky enough to spend over $5,000 on one. However, we have seen some testing, and MSI weren't lying about that power draw. It's a thirsty beast.

KitGuruTech managed to get their hands on it, and in gaming tests, they saw a max pull of 1076 W in Cyberpunk 2077 when overclocked. The rig they have popped that monstrously powerful card in has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an MSI X870 Carbon motherboard, plus 64 GB of DDR5 memory, and an MSI MPG 1600 W power supply.

A Plague Tale: Requiem got an average of around 650 W with a max of 754 W. Tests for Hardware Unboxed tell a similar story, getting up to 845 W in A Plague Tale: Requiem, with it dropping down to 731 W without overclocking. Non-overclocking power consumption still sits comfortably higher than the Founders Edition RTX 5090 (by between 20-70 W), but figures across the board report big performance gains too.

MSI Built a 1000W RTX 5090… And It hit 1076W - YouTube

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The Lightning Z comes with two 600 W 12V-2x6 connectors, plus a USB Type-C port to connect to the built-in screen. Perhaps the most unique part of the card, as we reported last month, is the fact that it is watercooled and designed to "completely ignore the concepts of balance in favour of extremes."

Nothing shows the extremes of this MSI card more than the price, with us spotting it being listed for an unfortunately rather funny $5090 over at Best Buy. Now you may say a $3,000 increase on the RTX 5090 MSRP for a 15% performance bump absolutely isn't worth the cash, but you'd have to assume you can get one right now, which is a pretty big assumption.

If you need an entire rig though, you can pick up an RTX 5090 PC (with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, and 2 TB of SSD storage), for around $500 less than the Lightning Z. I certainly know where my money would be going, and not just because I'd need a time machine, luck, and a seriously loaded bank account to want that 1000 W behemoth.

Best graphics card 2026

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

👉Check out our full graphics card guide👈

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James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.

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