The MSI GeForce RTX 5090D v2 Lightning has officially appeared on the Chinese market, according to a Bilibili user named “Hardware Patrick Star.” This China-exclusive SKU is an adaptation of the new GeForce RTX 5090D v2 with MSI’s overclocking enhancements, allowing the card to reach new performance heights, paired with an all-in-one liquid cooler. The new RTX 5090D v2 retains the GB202 family’s compute power, with 21,760 CUDA cores, Blackwell architecture, and a 575 W TGP, but reduces the memory to 24 GB of GDDR7 on a 384-bit bus, compared to the previous 32 GB on a 512-bit bus. MSI noted that the GeForce RTX 5090D Lightning GPU is limited to 1,300 units. However, since the China-exclusive SKU is considered a completely different graphics card, it is possible that there are another 1,300 units for the Chinese market with the RTX 5090D v2 Lightning model. The Bilibili user has SKU number 909, indicating that the rest have been distributed to retail channels.
We reviewed MSI’s regular GeForce RTX 5090 Lightning graphics card and found that the GPU can reach up to 1,000 W with an OC BIOS loaded. We observed an average GPU clock speed of 3,218 MHz due to the water cooling. Independent testing might show the RTX 5090D v2 Lightning achieving similar performance levels, but since it’s a China-focused SKU, we could only see reviews from Chinese hardware reviewers. Earlier claims by EXPreview indicate that hands-on testing suggests mixed results for buyers. In pure gaming, the RTX 5090D and RTX 5090D v2 cards are often nearly identical, with frame rate differences usually within a percent or two, so most current 4K titles will not noticeably suffer from the missing 8 GB. For AI workloads and model inference, the gap is more significant, with single-digit to low-double-digit performance drops where extra memory is important.
