Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 first impressions: more graphics card power in a smaller GPU
First look at Nvidia's new flagship graphics card
I’ve got the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 in for review. While our testing will be in just three days, I wanted to give you a sneak peek at the new card and specifically discuss its design. Now that it’s shrunk into a two-slot design, it’s finally small enough to truly fit into an SFF (small form factor) case. It also features a new, completely flow-through design, new ports, and more. Let’s dive into it.
📦New box. Nvidia has completely changed the packaging for its RTX 50-series cards. Instead of an Xbox-looking box, our RTX 5090 shipped in a cardboard box with a smaller bone-colored shell shaped like the graphics card housed inside. The new box is a nice display piece after installing the card, as it's embossed with the GPU’s model number.
🤏 Smaller two-slot card. The Nvidia RTX 5090 is finally back to being a dual-slot-sized graphics card. That should make Nvidia’s flagship GPU a better fit for Mini-ITX and SFF builds since the xx90 cards ballooned to a triple-slot size with the RTX 3090. It’s also an amazing feat that Nvidia has managed to pack the RTX 5090’s greater number of transistors into a smaller card and PCB.
💨Truly flow-through design. As I just mentioned, the Nvidia RTX 5090’s overall PCB is even smaller now, so almost the whole card is fully see-through. Shinning a light through the card reveals both fans can freely push air through a series of heat pipes and the radiator grills. Comparatively, the last RTX 4090 Founders Edition only had a flow-through heatsink on the front half of it.
📺 HDMI 2.1b- and DP 2.1-ready. The Nvidia RTX 5090 comes with one HDMI 2.1b and three DisplayPort 2.1 ports. These ports readily support 4K 120fps gaming, whether you’re connecting the card to a gaming monitor or 4K TV. The DisplayPort 2.1 ports are the biggest addition as they support up to 80Gbps, which can support up to 4K 240fps gaming monitors and 8K 120fps displays.
📋 Core specs. While we can’t dive too deep into the Nvidia RTX 5090 specs just yet, we can outline some of the GPU’s specs now. The Nvidia RTX 5090 features 92 billion transistors with 21,760 CUDA Cores and 32GB of GDDR7 video memory. It also has the latest 5th Generation Tensor cores and 4th Generation Ray Tracing cores. With DLSS 4, the GeForce RTX 5090 promises to outperform the GeForce RTX 4090 by two times.
✍️ Full review to come. Stay tuned for our full review, which will be in three days. It’ll include performance analysis and benchmarks charts. We’ll soon see if the RTX 5090 delivers on all the performance promises Nvidia has made.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
Shame scalpers will buy every single one within seconds meaning none for actual gamers.