Air-Cooled Record: RTX 5090 with Shunt Mod Breaks into 3DMark Top

An enthusiast known as thavidreadertrue surprised the community by overclocking an NVIDIA RTX 5090 using only air cooling. Replacing the stock 2 mΩ shunt resistors with 1 mΩ ones doubled the card’s power limit to 1,200 W. By default, the RTX 5090 draws around 600 W. Such modifications are usually paired with liquid cooling, but the owner kept the original Gigabyte Aorus Master ICE cooler, believing it was sufficient for heat dissipation.

Cooling Optimization

The overclocker upgraded the thermal interface with PTM 7950 and Upsiren UX Ultra compounds. Under load, the GPU consumed about 820 W, maintained a 3.2 GHz clock speed, and ran at 1.060 V with temperatures around 79 °C. For comparison, the RTX 5090’s factory boost clock is only 2.4 GHz. This setup delivered results never before seen among air-cooled cards.

 Benchmark Records

In 3DMark Speedway, the RTX 5090 paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D scored 16,559 points, placing 9th in the global ranking. In Steel Nomad, it took 11th place with 17,125 points, and in Port Royal, it ranked 15th with 43,378 points. This is the only air-cooled RTX 5090 to achieve such high standings across multiple tests, proving that extreme overclocking is possible even without liquid cooling.