Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 unboxing: Up close and personal with the new gaming GPU

While we eagerly anticipate the final release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 at the end of January, we thought we’d give you a taster of what to expect in terms of physical hardware, as we have a card in the labs right now. The new graphics card comes in a much smaller box than all the RTX 4000 cards, and inside it you’ll find a svelte and slimline card as well.

We can’t definitively tell you if the RTX 5090 is indeed the best graphics card right now, but we can at least show you the card itself. Nvidia has really gone to town on the physical design, implementing a brand new flow-through cooling system that means the new flagship card only takes up two slots. It’s positively tiny compared to the RTX 4090, as you’ll see in a minute.

Anyway, the whole thing starts with a box, as Jack Skellington would say, and we love what Nvidia has done with the simple packaging here. It’s basic, but it’s small and won’t take up too much space.

This new box, and indeed the cardboard box in which it ships, are slimmer than the RTX 4000 shipping boxes. If you ever need to sell your card on Ebay in the future, then you can look forward to cheaper shipping costs too. Plus it’s all made from plain card, so it’s recyclable.

You open the box by sliding out the card inserts on the top and bottom, following the direction of the arrows. You can then lift off the lid, and hey presto, there it is, what you’ve just bought for $1,999, the new flagship Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics card. Lift it out and you’ll see that its cooler has a very different design from the RTX 4090, with the fans now mounted only on one side of the card.

This is a clever bit of design from Nvidia, and it’s all thanks to the RTX 5090 PCB being positively tiny. There are other PCBs inside the card, for example, to connect the outputs on the rear I/O plate, but the basic PCB itself is small enough for both the fans on the cooler to push air directly over the heatsinks on either side that cover the GPU, and the straight out of the matching vents on the back.

You won’t want to put this graphics card in a vertical mount right next to a solid glass side panel, but it’s remarkable that Nvidia has condensed its new top-end GPU into a two-slot card. You only need to look at it directly on top of the previous flagship, the RTX 4090, to see how much thinner Nvidia has made the new card, as both cards otherwise have very similar dimensions.

Put the two cards side by side and you can also see the slimline dimensions of the new RTX 5090, and move to the top and you’ll see the new angled 16-pin socket for the 12V connector. As with the RTX 4000 series, Nvidia also supplies an adapter to convert the 16-pin plug to four eight-pin PCIe sockets, for those of us with older PSUs.

You’ll find this adapter in the brown cardboard shipping box, rather than the smaller graphics card box, and the new adapter now also has individually sleeved cables, which look much more attractive than the chunky one-cable-per-plug approach that Nvidia took with previous adapters.

It’s still quite short, though – you’ll want a dedicated 12V cable with a longer length if you want to hide all the PCIe adapters. If you do buy one, though, make sure it’s the right kind for your brand and model of PSU, as different models have varying cable configurations.

And there it is, meet the potential new king of the gaming graphics world, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. For more detail on what’s coming with the rest of the cards in the lineup, check out our guide to the RTX 5080, as well as the RTX 5070, both of which are significantly cheaper than the 5090.