With the advent of NVIDIA RTX 50 series (Blackwell) Last night the trillion-dollar GPU maker updated its line of GPUs. SFF-ready list of supported Nvidia GPUs to include the new Blackwell GPUs. The updated listing shows that the RTX 5090 Founders Edition is the only RTX 5090 variant that qualifies as an SFF-enabled product.
NVIDIA SFF-Ready Recommendations dictate that Nvidia is 70th class RTX 40 series (Ada Lovelace) or 50 series graphics card should not be taller than 151mm, including the bend radius of the power cable, no longer than 304mm and no thicker than 50mm or 2.5 PCIe slots. The all-new Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card fully meets these specifications: 137mm long, 304mm tall, 40mm thick and has two PCIe slots.
This makes the RTX 5090 Founders Edition the first and only Nvidia 90-class flagship GPU to meet Nvidia’s small form factor requirements. None of the previous generation Nvidia Ada Lovelace GPUs, including PTX 4090were small enough to comply with Nvidia’s rules, and by the looks of it, none of AIB’s RTX 5090-based partner cards are small enough. By comparison, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition cooler is so small that it’s the same size (down to the millimeter) as the RTX 5080 Founders Edition, despite the RTX 5080 consuming nearly half the power of the RTX 5090.
To achieve this goal, Nvidia has redesigned the Founders Edition compared to the 40 series to improve cooling efficiency and reduce the size of the cooler compared to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. Parts of the redesign include thermometal, a more efficient dual flow cooler design, and a three-piece PCB. This allowed Nvidia to provide enough cooling performance to cool the RTX 5090 and its very power-hungry 575W TDP, while keeping the dual-slot processor thin. In contrast, the RTX 4090 Founders Edition drew 450W but occupied three raw PCIe slots, knocking it out of Nvidia’s SFF-Ready qualification.
The RTX 5090 is the only video card with this “problem”. Founders Edition (where applicable) and AIB variants of the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 may be considered SFF compatible.
The small size of the RTX 5090 Founders Edition will inevitably make this GPU an ideal option for small form factor builds or for those looking to build a high-end system with a “normal sized” graphics card. We expect the RTX 50 series to launch by the end of this month.