I’m installing an Nvidia RTX 5090 in my SFF mini PC

In 2022, I wrote that GPUs were heading in the wrong direction – Its price, size and power consumption were off the charts. And while I still believe this to be true, I can now confirm that Nvidia has made at least one exception in the size class: the two-slot “Founder’s Edition” of its RTX 5090 graphics card, which goes on sale January 30th.

The last time Nvidia made a flagship graphics card with two slots was in 2021 RTX 3080 FE -The 3090, 4080 and 4090 were giant in comparison.

So, while my colleague Tom Warren was busy writing His full review of the new 5090 Use Best CPU for GamingI installed one of the $2,000 cards in my old little desktop. I wanted to know if this surprisingly small flagship GPU was really ready for small form factor (SFF) cases — or if it was. The beloved 12.7L Ncase M1 chassis Good and really outdated.

To my surprise, it worked: All I needed was a new power supply to turn my backpack-sized daily driver into one of the most powerful gaming PCs in the world. At 4K, I typically see more than double the frame rate I get with the RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition, which is one of the last cards that can fit comfortably in the Ncase M1, to give you some ideas.

But I won’t suggest you do the same! First, we are talking about A Two thousand dollars Graphics card and One thousand watts The power supply – which I’ve actually seen consumes up to one full kilowatt (as measured by… My trusted kill wat On the wall) in my country Cyberpunk 2077 Tests. With the RTX 3080, my system consumed over 200 watts less. Not that I mind having a heater on these cold January days!

But I literally had to insert the 5090 into my Ncase M1 to make it fit, and even remove the video card bracket and plug it back inside my case. Even then I couldn’t close the desktop completely because New 12V-2×6 power connector for GPU It takes up a good chunk of space where the side panel of my case is supposed to go. You will want SFF ready status With more clearance than I have.

However, leaving the innards of my desktop exposed was a small price to pay for playing with this much power! It’s enough to run games at 4K resolution at maximum settings, excluding full ray tracing (also known as path tracing). It’s even powerful enough to power track tracking too, if you combine it with dynamic upscaling and/or fake frame generation technology.

I usually play Hell Divers 2 On an old 3060 Ti graphics card that I bought for only $400, I have to rely on just those tricks to get smooth 4K gameplay. It was great, if predictable, to finally max out this game on the 5090 instead.

What I didn’t expect: The old, space-constrained AMD 5800X desktop delivered the same performance as Tom’s outdoor test rig in a fair number of 4K gaming benchmarks. I knew it was possible, but he shows it Nvidia’s awesome two-slot “dual-flow” cooler. Really suitable for SFF computers.

It depends on whether your games are CPU limited, of course, since my old PC had a slower CPU — and most games today tend to be at least somewhat CPU limited at 1440p, where often… Tom’s system advances by 20 to 60 percent.

Confronting swarms of alien beings and the flying particles in them ReturningFor example, Tom pulled 201 fps at 1440p while my small desktop only managed 169 fps; in Horizon Zero Dawn Remasteredthe most CPU-intensive game we test, my throttling system averaged just 123 fps versus Tom’s 200 fps.

But that’s still over 120fps on max settings, which is more than enough for smooth sessions of these single-player games! And if I pair my mini tower with a 4K TV in the living room instead of a 1440p monitor, as many SFF PC builders might want to do, I’ll have a blast — 4K results almost always average over 60 frames per second , and were also often within a few frames per second of Tom’s open bench.

And again, I typically see the RTX 5090 offering more than double the horsepower of the RTX 3080, making it quite the upgrade for deep-pocketed SFF fans. That’s not necessarily something to celebrate, though: The $2,000 RTX 5090 will certainly cost more than twice as much as the $700 RTX 3080 when it launches in 2020, and will be out of reach for most gamers even If the shortage and speculators Don’t raise their ugly heads

When it comes down to it, I think the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is a pretty impressive package. Makes me want to quote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off because that it So option. It’s a noteworthy exception to the very annoying trend of GPUs expanding in every direction. But at $2,000, and 575 watts of power alone, and with no other partner on Nvidia’s board offering anything nearly as big, this is the exception that proves the rule.

Photography by Sean Hollister/The Verge