Get up close and personal with the new gaming GPU

While we eagerly await the final release of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 At the end of January, we thought we’d give you a glimpse of what to expect in terms of physical hardware, since we have a card in the labs now. The new graphics card comes in a much smaller box than all RTX 4000 cards, and inside you’ll find a slim and slim card as well.

We can’t tell you definitively whether it is RTX 5090 It actually is Best graphics card Now, but we can at least show you the card itself. Nvidia They’ve really gone all-in on the physical design, implementing an all-new flow-through cooling system which means the new flagship card only takes up two slots. It’s positively small compared to the RTX 4090, as you’ll see in a minute.

Anyway, it all starts with a box, says Jack Skellington, and we like what Nvidia has done with simple packaging here. It’s basic, but small and won’t take up much space.

This new box, and the cardboard box it ships in, are thinner than the RTX 4000’s shipping boxes. If you need to sell your card on Ebay in the future, you can look forward to cheaper shipping costs as well. Plus, they’re all made from regular paper, so they’re recyclable.

You can open the chest by moving the cards at the top and bottom, following the direction of the arrows. You can then lift the lid, and there you have it, what you just bought for $1,999, a new Nvidia flagship RTX 5000 Graphics card. Lift it up and you’ll see that its cooler has a completely different design than the RTX 4090, with the fans now mounted on only one side of the card.

This is a clever bit of design from Nvidia, and it’s all thanks to it RTX 5090 PCB Being positively small. There are other PCBs inside the card, for example, to connect the pins on the rear I/O panel, but the basic PCB itself is small enough for each of the fans on the cooler to push air directly over the heatsinks on either side Covered by the GPU, direct output from matching slots on the back.

You wouldn’t want to put this graphics card in a vertical rack next to a solid glass side panel, but it’s notable that Nvidia has condensed its new high-end GPU into a dual-slot card. You only have to look directly at the top of the previous flagship card, the RTX 4090, to see how thin Nvidia made the new card, as both cards have very similar dimensions.

Place the two cards side by side and you can also see the slim dimensions of the new RTX 5090, scroll to the top and you’ll see the new 16-pin socket for the 12V connector. As with the RTX 4000 series, Nvidia also provides an adapter to convert the 16-pin plug to four eight-pin PCIe sockets, for those of us with older PSUs.

You’ll find this adapter in the brown cardboard shipping box, rather than the smaller graphics card box, and the new adapter now also has individually sleeved cables, which looks much more attractive than Nvidia’s chunky approach of having one cable per plug. Took with previous transformers.

However, it’s still quite short – you’ll need a dedicated 12V cable of a longer length if you want to hide all the PCIe adapters. If you buy one, make sure it’s the right type for your brand and model of PSU, as different models have different cable configurations.

And there you have it, meet the potential new king of the gaming graphics world, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. For more details on what comes with the rest of the cards in the lineup, check out our guide to RTX 5080And also RTX 5070Both are much cheaper than the 5090.