Interview: Nvidia explains RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition radical redesign

If you’re a PC gamer, and you have a lot of room in your budget, the biggest news to come out of CES 2025 is almost certainly Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 GPU. That’s figuratively big, not literally, because the Founder’s Edition of this $2,000 beast is shockingly small at just two PCIE card slots. Adam Patrick Murray cornered Nvidia’s Senior Director of Products Justin Walker to talk about it.

Walker says that Nvidia prioritized a smaller volume for the high-end card specifically to help it fit into smaller PC cases such as mini-ITX builds. They did this by organizing the airflow around the circuit board, shrinking the PCB to get fans on either side for more air volume without higher noise. It’s also using secondary circuit boards for the PCIE connector and the output board, the bit at the edge of the card that you plug HDMI and DisplayPort cables into.

In short it’s a hell of a lot of engineering, bucking trends that have been around for about as long as discrete graphics cards have. The fans themselves have been designed and tuned for an ideal balance of airflow and noise. Even the guard grille on the exterior of the GPU is slightly concave, which helps to even out the air pressure differentials inside and outside the card’s housing.

PCWorld

All of Nvidia’s self-produced Founders Editions will get at least some of this miniaturization work — the RTX 5070 and 5080 are likewise much smaller than the last few generations, and partner-produced versions might take advantage of the same design cues to conform to the SFF guidelines that Nvidia laid out last year. Others will probably be much bigger, using beefier coolers to add features like some factory overclocking.

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