Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition
Nvidia provided its RTX 5090 Founders Edition for this review, the reference model that everything else needs to try to beat. It's a very different beast compared to prior top-tier models, in both packaging and form factor. Our 5090 unboxing covered this already, but let's recap.
Assuming the box we received is the same for all 5090 Founders Edition cards, it's a major change from the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. Nvidia is "going green" on the packaging, with no inks or plastics and a box made of recycled paper fibers. And yes, we get the irony of a potential 575W graphics card trying to be green. It's certainly a different look for a GPU package.
The 5090 Founders Edition card weighs 1826g, a sizeable weight loss compared to the 4090 Founders Edition that weighed 2186g. That's 360g lighter, or about 0.8 pounds. Nvidia also qualifies for its own SFF-ready guidelines, though the length and height are the same as before. The card measures 304x137x40 mm, compared to a width of 61mm on the 4090 card.
Nvidia continues to use a 16-pin power connector, but this time it's the updated and improved 12V-2x6 rather than the 12VHPWR initially used with the 40-series (and later replaced after numerous 4090 cards suffered meltdowns). Nvidia says it's confident the adapter problems have been solved, even when pulling 575W through the 16-pin connector. We'll have to wait and see if that proves correct.
One interesting change is that the provided quad-8-pin to 16-pin adapter this time has rather flexible individually sheathed cables. Combined with the angled 16-pin socket on the card and the 2-slot width, the 5090 Founders Edition should be much easier to fit into a variety of cases. Whether a mini-ITX case can handle the heat and power output is a different matter.
Nvidia's 5090 Founders Edition — and all 5090 cards — come with a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot connector, which you can tell by the "T" markings on the gold fingers. It also features DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 support on all three DP outputs, which allows up to 4K 480Hz or 8K 165Hz (using DSC — Display Stream Compression). There's also a single HDMI 2.1 output that can do up to 4K 240Hz / 8K 120Hz.
The 5090 FE uses liquid metal as a thermal interface material (TIM) between the GPU and the heatsink, and as such it should not be disassembled. That's one aspect of the card design that helps with keeping a dual-slot 575W part cool.
It also has a double flow through design that's enabled by using one larger PCB for the GPU and memory, which then links to a separate PCB that houses the PCIe x16 connector, and a third PCB that contains the video outputs. The radiator fins also feature an indentation that's supposed to help optimize airflow.
Two custom 115mm fans are present, the same design as the previous generation. The fans run reasonably quiet in our experience, even at higher power loads. Ventilation slots on the top and bottom of the card help to direct the exhaust away from the fan intakes to minimize the recylcing of warmed up air.
RGB lighting is present, in a relatively minimalistic form. Like the 4090 Founders Edition, the "X" shape has lighting, on both sides of the card. The GeForce logo on top of the card also lights up. By default, all the lighting is white, but it can be controlled through various software utilities.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
