I don’t find many graphics cards appealing. Without some wild case designs or pre-built desktops made to offer looks and power in equal measure, they seem like excess compared to the other sleek, low-profile components. The Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition, on the other hand, appears downright menacing. It’s a slab of dark grey metal, a demanding, brick-like beetle ready to leech onto your PSU and fully consume your PC.
Nvidia sent me the RTX 5090 to review but stipulated that I can’t yet show you it powered on. I can’t even show it snuggled up warm in a desktop case. So with those limitations, here are my first impressions.
The RTX 5090 Founders Edition is about 12 inches by 5.3 inches and 2 inches deep. That’s roughly the same length and width of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition with the same two-fan variation. However, the new card is shorter than the previous. This is a two-slot card, though that doesn’t mean any future OEMs will keep to those dimensions.
But for that, it’s a heavy card. It had been out in a cold FedEx truck for so long the metal was nearly painful to touch. Even when I had it up to room temperature, the GPU felt chunky, with practically no room wasted in this slab of metal and silicon. It’s the kind of card that makes me nervous to put into my case supported by nothing but a PCIe slot and two screws.
When compared to the other cards we have on hand, namely a PNY RTX 4080 Super, an Asus RTX 4080 Super, and a MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super—all with three fans—the 5090 seems more self-contained. It takes up fewer slots inside your case, but it desperately demands some kind of extra support for any end sticking outside your motherboard.
Nvidia swears its new cooling apparatus will manage to keep the card cool under pressure. The card’s intake is below, and the exhaust comes out the vents above. That should be good for most setups where airflow normally goes from bottom to top.
The weight adds to the overall aesthetics of the Founders Edition. It’s intimidating in grey metallics, especially compared to the RTX 4090’s silver sides. You can see into the GPU when you shine a light on it, enough to see the heat pipes running through it. Otherwise, it still includes the glowing GeForce RTX logo when the card is turned on.
The Founders Edition card now comes in a corrugated cardboard box that’s supposed to emulate the footprint of the 5090. Inside is the GPU without any anti-static bag or sleeve. It didn’t seem necessary, as the packaging was tight enough to keep it from moving around. Other than the card, the box came with a single, short 4x PCIe 5.0 adapter. Nvidia has said you’ll either need the adapter hooked up to four PCIe 8-pin connectors or a 600W PCIe Gen 5 cable.
It also requires at least a 1000 W of system power, so if you felt okay running a RTX 4080 Super with an 850 W PSU, it’s yet another piece you’ll need to upgrade to support Nvidia’s hefty new GPU.
The 16-pin power connection now sits at an angle to the card itself. This may be a boon for smaller cases, but I know in my current setup with the Origin PC it will actually mean I need to twist the power connection up to fit it in the correct slots. Behind it, the only ports you’ll find are three DisplayPort 2.1 and a single HDMI 2.1b.