By now, if you’re reading this site, you’ve almost certainly seen plenty of the GeForce RTX 5090—and if you haven’t, check out some of our past coverage. Contrary to expectations, the card and its cooler are actually incredibly small in comparison with the GeForce RTX 4090, to say nothing of the massive prototypes that we saw. Despite that, NVIDIA says it stays cool, something we’ll certainly verify in our upcoming review.
If you, like us, have wondered how that’s possible, then you should check out the video that the company just posted up on its official YouTube channel. Titled “Designing the Founders Edition,” the twelve-minute-plus video goes quite in-depth disclosing not only the design of the GPU and its cooler, but also the reasons for the way the card is designed.
So it goes that the company’s engineers sliced up the PCB into four separate parts and packed components onto the actual GPU board as tightly as anyone has ever packed components. The engineers refer to the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition as a “fully-integrated thermal-mechanical-electrical solution,” and that makes sense given that you’re not going to be easily replacing the cooler on one of these cards.
We’re really eager to show off how Blackwell performs for ourselves, and we’re sure that you’re dying to see the benchmarks, but those will have to wait for our full review. In the meantime, check out both NVIDIA’s cool video above as well as our unboxing video on the HotHardware YouTube channel if you want to see this thing in the flesh.