Whereas we eagerly anticipate the ultimate launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 on the finish of January, we thought we’d provide you with a taster of what to anticipate when it comes to bodily {hardware}, as we now have a card within the labs proper now. The brand new graphics card is available in a a lot smaller field than all of the RTX 4000 playing cards, and inside it you’ll discover a svelte and slimline card as effectively.
We will’t definitively inform you if the RTX 5090 is certainly the perfect graphics card proper now, however we will not less than present you the cardboard itself. Nvidia has actually gone to city on the bodily design, implementing a model new flow-through cooling system meaning the brand new flagship card solely takes up two slots. It’s positively tiny in comparison with the RTX 4090, as you’ll see in a minute.
Anyway, the entire thing begins with a field, as Jack Skellington would say, and we love what Nvidia has accomplished with the easy packaging right here. It’s primary, but it surely’s small and received’t take up an excessive amount of house.
This new field, and certainly the cardboard field by which it ships, are slimmer than the RTX 4000 transport bins. Should you ever have to promote your card on Ebay sooner or later, then you possibly can look ahead to cheaper transport prices too. Plus it’s all constructed from plain card, so it’s recyclable.
You open the field by sliding out the cardboard inserts on the highest and backside, following the route of the arrows. You may then elevate off the lid, and hey presto, there it’s, what you’ve simply purchased for $1,999, the brand new flagship Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics card. Elevate it out and also you’ll see that its cooler has a really completely different design from the RTX 4090, with the followers now mounted solely on one aspect of the cardboard.
This can be a intelligent little bit of design from Nvidia, and it’s all because of the RTX 5090 PCB being positively tiny. There are different PCBs inside the cardboard, for instance, to attach the outputs on the rear I/O plate, however the primary PCB itself is sufficiently small for each the followers on the cooler to push air straight over the heatsinks on both aspect that cowl the GPU, and the straight out of the matching vents on the again.
You received’t wish to put this graphics card in a vertical mount proper subsequent to a stable glass aspect panel, but it surely’s outstanding that Nvidia has condensed its new top-end GPU right into a two-slot card. You solely want to have a look at it straight on prime of the earlier flagship, the RTX 4090, to see how a lot thinner Nvidia has made the brand new card, as each playing cards in any other case have very comparable dimensions.
Put the 2 playing cards aspect by aspect and you may also see the slimline dimensions of the brand new RTX 5090, and transfer to the highest and also you’ll see the brand new angled 16-pin socket for the 12V connector. As with the RTX 4000 collection, Nvidia additionally provides an adapter to transform the 16-pin plug to 4 eight-pin PCIe sockets, for these of us with older PSUs.
You’ll discover this adapter within the brown cardboard transport field, fairly than the smaller graphics card field, and the brand new adapter now additionally has individually sleeved cables, which look far more engaging than the chunky one-cable-per-plug strategy that Nvidia took with earlier adapters.
It’s nonetheless fairly quick, although – you’ll desire a devoted 12V cable with an extended size if you wish to cover all of the PCIe adapters. Should you do purchase one, although, ensure it’s the correct in your model and mannequin of PSU, as completely different fashions have various cable configurations.
And there it’s, meet the potential new king of the gaming graphics world, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. For extra element on what’s coming with the remainder of the playing cards within the lineup, take a look at our information to the RTX 5080, in addition to the RTX 5070, each of that are considerably cheaper than the 5090.