Upgrade Your Aging SFF PC with a Lightning-Fast Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU

The RTX 5090: A Satisfying Exception to the Rule of Growing GPUs

In 2022, I wrote that GPUs were headed in the wrong direction – their price, size, and power consumption were all ballooning out of control. And while I still believe that’s true, I can now confirm that Nvidia has at least made one remarkable exception to this trend: the two-slot "Founder’s Edition" of its RTX 5090 graphics card, available starting January 30th.

The last time Nvidia made a two-slot flagship graphics card, it was the 2021 RTX 3080 Ti FE. And once again, the 5090 is a remarkable departure from the larger, more power-hungry GPUs that have become the norm.

But what does it take to make a GPU like this a reality? Take a look at the gallery above to see the RTX 5090 squeezed into a small form factor PC case, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of power and complexity involved. This card is essentially a beast, and it requires a new power supply to come alive.

To my surprise, it worked: all I needed was a new power supply to turn my compact daily driver into one of the most powerful gaming PCs in the world. At 4K resolution, I’m typically seeing more than double the framerate I get with an RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition, one of the last cards that could comfortably fit in the Ncase M1.

But I’m not going to suggest you do the same. For starters, we’re talking about a $2,000 graphics card and a 1,000-watt power supply – which I actually saw consuming up to 1 kilowatt (as measured by my trusty Kill A Watt at the wall) in my Cyberpunk 2077 tests. With an RTX 3080, my system consumed over 200 fewer watts. Not that I minded having a space heater on these cold January days!

Still, leaving my desktop’s guts exposed was a small price to pay to toy with this much power. It’s enough to play games at 4K with max settings, save for full ray tracing (aka path tracing). And it’s even got enough horsepower to turn on path tracing, too, if you combine it with dynamic upscaling and/or fake frame generating tech.

I normally play Helldivers 2 on an old 3060 Ti graphics card I bought for just $400, where I’m forced to rely on those tricks just to get smooth 4K-ish gameplay. It was quite nice, if expected, to finally max out that game on the 5090 instead.

What I didn’t expect: my aging, space-constrained AMD 5800X desktop delivered the same performance as Tom’s open-air testing rig in quite a few of our 4K gaming benchmarks. It goes to show that Nvidia’s fancy two-slot "double flow through" cooler really is suitable for SFF PCs.

A word of caution, though: it’s all dependent on the games you play. If your games are CPU limited, as many are at 1440p resolution, then the CPU will hold back the system’s frame rates. And as Tom’s system often pulled ahead by 20-60 percent, my PC’s CPU – and likely yours too – will be the bottleneck in many cases.

When it comes down to it, I think the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is a darn cool piece of kit. It makes me want to quote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off because it is so choice. It’s a noteworthy exception to the very annoying trend of GPUs expanding in every direction. But at $2,000, 575 watts of power by its lonesome, and with no other Nvidia board partner offering anything nearly as compact, it’s the exception that proves the rule.

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