For practical purposes, many of the GeForce RTX 4080 cards (Including the Super variant) shared the same cooler sizes as several RTX 4090 GPUs. The lower 320 watt TDP of the RTX 4080 made this even more overkill, but assisted in economies of scale for manufacturers.
In recent years, NVIDIA has made strides with its Founders Edition GPU cooler designs. Evolving from the blower style coolers of the GTX 10 series, it slowly progressed forward with the dual fan design of the RTX 2080 Ti, for example. The RTX 30 series brought entirely new concepts to bare, which were further tweaked with the eventual RTX 40 series lineup.
The current RTX 4090 cooler for NVIDIA’s Founders Edition model has proved popular and quite capable of handling the thermal loads of this GPU. Whether the Blackwell-based RTX 5090 will have a 600 watt TDP is up for debate, as the 12VHPWHR connector is at its limits there. It can still have that capability, to have massive overhead if the TDP ends up being much less.
There has been one drawback with the large RTX 4090 cooler designs, to the chagrin of some. The very wide and over-the-top size of many coolers has given trouble to many PC builders who cannot fit them properly in standard cases. This has raised the call for differently angled cables, even angled adapters. Unfortunately, many issues have arisen, with some such adapters undergoing a complete recall. If the air cooler sizes were smaller, there likely would be less reason to bend cables or use third-party adapters.
Efficiency while providing class-leading power has been a hallmark of the RTX 40 series, not to mention the power savings when combined with NVIDIA’s DLSS 3. The RTX 5090 will no doubt be powerful, and likely demand significant power to keep it satisfied. The cooler attached to it will have not only performance considerations, but also aesthetic impact for consumers.