MSI has unveiled a new Nvidia RTX 4080 Super graphics card that combines air cooling and liquid cooling in a single, self-contained unit. Not only is there a waterblock attached to the GPU on the new MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16G Expert Fuzion, but the card also contains the whole radiator and pump system, meaning you don’t need to find room to mount an extra radiator in your case.
We had the chance to see this new MSI graphics card for ourselves on the show floor at Computex, and it’s a really interesting take on one of the best graphics cards you can buy right now. It doesn’t look any larger than the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert (and it has a very similar outside design too) that we saw at CES earlier in the year, but there’s a whole water-cooling loop hidden under the cooler’s exterior.
The innovative cooler design places a microfinned copper baseplate on top of the GPU, with a low-profile waterblock/pump unit on top of it, leaving some room for airflow around the GPU area. This pump then connects to the radiator that takes up half of the graphics card, which is cooled by a fan on either side of the graphics card in a push-pull configuration.
Much like Nvidia’s flow-through Founders Edition coolers, one card pulls cool air from the bottom of the case over the radiator, while the one on the back pushes out of the top to be exhausted by your case’s airflow system. We’ve seen liquid-cooled GPUs before, of course, as well as the Palit hybrid GPU cooler, but this is the first time I’ve seen a whole self-contained liquid cooling system inside the graphics card cooler.
In addition to the RTX 4080 Super card, MSI was also showing off a similar design featuring Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090 GPU at Computex. Due to the increased heat output of the RTX 4090, the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 24G Suprim Fuzion has a double-width radiator inside it rather than the single-width radiator in the cheaper card, and it’s thicker as a result, as you can see in the photo below.
MSI says the integrated liquid cooling system in the RTX 4080 Super 16G Expert Fuzion is “built to enhance graphics card performance,” hinting at a decent overclock being applied to this card, or perhaps just more cooling headroom for boosting. MSI hasn’t revealed pricing and availability details for the RTX 4080 Super 16G Expert Fuzion yet, but we’ll be watching this space closely.
To see more of the PC hardware goodies that have been unveiled at Computex, check out all out first-hand coverage from the show floor in our Computex news hub.