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

If you’re a PC gamer with plenty of room in your budget, the biggest news about CES 2025 is almost certainly New Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU. That’s figurative, not literal, because the $2,000 Founder’s Edition of this beast is shockingly small, with just two PCIE card slots. Adam Patrick Murray cornered Nvidia senior product director Justin Walker to talk about it.

Walker says Nvidia prioritized the smaller footprint of the high-end card specifically so it could fit into smaller PC cases, such as mini-ITX builds. They did this by organizing the airflow around the PCB, making the PCB smaller to place fans on both sides to increase air volume without increasing noise. It also uses secondary cards for the PCIE connector and output card, the bit on the edge of the card where you connect the HDMI and DisplayPort cables.

In short, it’s a hell of a lot of engineering that bucks trends that have been around for about as long as discrete graphics cards have been around. The fans themselves have been designed and tuned for the perfect balance of airflow and noise. Even the grille on the outside of the GPU is slightly concave, which helps equalize the difference in air pressure inside and outside the card case.

All Nvidia-produced Founders Editions will feature at least some of this miniaturization—the RTX 5070 and 5080 are also much smaller than the last few generations—and partner-produced versions could use the same design features to fit SFF recommendations outlined by Nvidia last year. Others will likely be much larger and use more powerful coolers to add features such as factory overclocking.

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