Leaked: GeForce RTX 5090 FE Ditches Bulk for Dual-Slot Design
This year, NVIDIA will unveil its next-generation gaming graphics cards, the Geforce RTX 50 series, based on the Blackwell architecture. It is anticipated to be released as early as the fourth quarter of this year. Similar to the previous Geforce RTX 30/40 series, the initial focus will be on high-end products, with the debut of the RTX 5090 appearing almost certain.
Recently, a netizen revealed that the Geforce RTX 5090 Founders Edition will have a thickness of only two slots and will be equipped with just two fans.
This claim is somewhat surprising, considering that in recent years, with the increase in performance and power consumption, the size of graphics cards has been steadily expanding, with larger cooling systems becoming a significant trend. Particularly for high-performance, high-end graphics cards, designs with three slots or more have become commonplace, and even four-slot designs are not rare. The current Geforce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is considered “slim” among its peers, yet it still has a three-slot thickness.
Previously, reports indicated that the Geforce RTX 5090 Founders Edition has a relatively complex structure, employing a design with three PCBs, and leaving room for dual-sided cooling. The three PCBs consist of the mainboard, one for housing the display controller, power supply system, and other components not requiring direct contact with the cooling assembly, and another for the PCIe components. The exact configuration of this three-PCB structure remains unclear, but maintaining a dual-slot thickness with such an intricate design raises curiosity about its feasibility.
Rumors suggest that the Geforce RTX 5090 will feature a 512-bit memory interface, requiring 16 GDDR7 memory chips, with a total memory capacity of 32GB. With the enhanced memory configuration, the layout of the memory chips will change from the 3-4-1-4 arrangement of the RTX 4090 to a 4-5-2-5 arrangement (clockwise). The GB202 chip will have 192 SMs (24576 CUDA cores), though the Geforce RTX 5090 will not utilize all SMs, likely employing between 170 and 180.
