GeForce RTX 5090: Nvidia's Founder Edition is an engineering gem

Nvidia announced its GeForce RTX 50 series range at CES 2025, if it was not so much the announced performance that created the surprise, it was the cooling system of the most high-end model, the GeForce RTX 5090 , which attracted attention.

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While the GeForce RTX 4090 features a total power envelope of 450W, the GeForce RTX 5090 pushes this envelope to 575W. The most unusual thing is not the consumption increase of 28%, but the reduction in the size of the GeForce RTX 5090 which goes from three PCI slots to two PCI slots. Thus paving the way for the possibility of integrating the GeForce RTX 5090 into SFF (Small Form Factor) configurations.

Thinner fins and Direct Flow

If Nvidia gave us details in its presentations, Malcolm Gutenburg, thermal engineer at Nvidia, gave many details to Steve Burke of GamerNexus on the design of the GeForce RTX 5090's cooling system.

Thanks to a design with three PCBs, one for the Blackwell chip, its power stages and the memory, another for the PCIe 5 port and another for the video outputs, Nvidia was able to implement a through-ventilation system ( Double Flow Through). Thus, the air pushed by the two fans passes through the radiators and escapes from the card without stagnating at the PCB. The hot air is thus evacuated directly above the card. The card shrouds are also specially designed to prevent hot air from flowing back towards the fans.

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The Nvidia engineer also explains having reduced the thickness of the radiator fins in order to add more and increase its dissipation surface. The most attentive will also have noticed the concave shape of the fins on the upper part. Once again, this is not done by chance since to save material, Nvidia reduced the height of the fins above the center of the fans where the air flow is less, to increase the height of the fins towards the outside the fans where the flow is greatest.

A unique steam chamber

To capture the calories produced by the GPU and evacuate them to the fins, Nvidia produced a unique vapor chamber directly linked to the heat pipes (the copper pipes). These are not welded to the steam chamber but are an integral part of the steam chamber. Once again, the number and shape of the heat pipes have been carefully studied to maximize thermal exchange.

The steam chamber itself, its shape, its relief have been optimized to promote the change of state of the heat transfer fluid and capture a maximum of calories. We thus notice the different structures used: pins, openings of the heat pipes and roughness of the surfaces.

Another optimization on the part of Nvidia, the use of liquid metal type thermal paste. The thermal paste acts as an exchanger between the surface of the GPU, also called heatspreader, and the vapor chamber. Its chemical composition and its viscosity make it possible to more or less well fill the imperfections between the heatspreader and the vapor chamber to maximize thermal exchanges.

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Liquid metal thermal paste is today the best in terms of thermal paste with extremely high conductivity. Disadvantage, its chemical composition is corrosive, especially with aluminum, and its application is delicate. Sony's first PlayStation 5s experienced some setbacks on this last point. To prevent any overflow of thermal paste, Nvidia has put in place three barriers to prevent this corrosive liquid from getting on the graphics card PCB.

If Nvidia has done everything possible to achieve the 575 W maximum consumption announced, there is one point that the chip designer cannot control: its environment. And from experience, we can tell you that you will need a well-ventilated case to release the calories produced by the GeForce RTX 5090. As we have seen, the air is not evacuated outside the case at all. by the card, we can only advise you to have at least two extraction fans and another inlet in your tower. Fans of mini-ITX cases and other SFF models will have to seriously work on this point to keep a graphics card properly cooled and ventilation bearable, especially since Nvidia announces maximum operating temperatures of 90 ° C beyond which the card will reduce its performance.

We can't wait to get our hands on a GeForce RTX 5090 and experience how the cooling system performs. Especially since the GeForce RTX 5090s from partners (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.) are all three PCI slots thick and some models have up to 5 fans. The Founder Edition of the RTX 5090 brings a real differentiating element from partner cards, let's hope that Nvidia has planned a significant stock.

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