Can we make it to six?
Undoubtedly the biggest news from CES 2025, at least for us PC gamers, has been the Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards. There’s a big jump up from the RTX 5080 to the RTX 5090, though—a $999 to $1,999 kind of jump—and we’re now seeing that all that apparent top-end grunt is pushing some AIB manufacturers to cram the 5090 chock-full of fans.
From Gigabyte, we’re seeing four fans on the 5090 with some Aorus Master variants, as the company says (via TechPowerUp): “The premium AORUS MASTER variant takes things a step further, featuring Screen Cooling Plus with an extra air-boosting fan for more airflow.” As you can see on the Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 Master Ice 32G, that extra “Screen Cooling Plus” fan is located on the bottom of the card.
So, three fans might be rookie numbers as far as Gigabyte’s concerned, but if MSI is anything to by, four might be similar, too. That’s because the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Special Edition, the company says, “redefines air cooling with its five STORMFORCE FANS, engineered for maximum airflow.”
MSI continues: “Each STORMFORCE FAN, integrated with MSI’s FiveFrozr Technology, features a claw-textured seven-blade design and a circular arc structure, providing exceptional cooling efficiency and thermal management for high-performance tasks and gaming.”
Based on the promotional material, it looks like the MSI card will have three fans on the top (presumably intake) and two on the bottom (presumably exhaust). This will be different to what we’ve seen from five-fan setups before such as the Maxsun GeForce RTX 4090 MGG OC, which has two extra tiny fans along the side of the card.
MSI’s more of a mainstream brand, too, of course, so this might mean triple-fan setups could start to seem like small change for air-cooled RTX 5090 cards.
Which is strange, considering the RTX 5090 Founders Edition (FE) that Nvidia showed everyone is a dual-fan card, not even a triple-fan one, and is the same size as the RTX 5080 FE.
The FE is a fair bit smaller than other AIB versions we’ve seen, though. The Asus ROG Astral cards, for instance, are absolute chonkers. That kind of chonkiness, at least, makes sense. The RTX 5090 packs in about 33% more cores than the RTX 4090—170 Shader Multiprocessors (SMs) on the former and 128 on the latter.
Judging by Nvidia’s promotional video, that increase, with the pretty big addition of DLSS 4, apparently boosts the RTX 5090 to over double the performance of the RTX 4090.
Four or five fans might make sense to cool such a beast. But if so, I can’t help but wonder how the dual-fan RTX 5090 FE will fare—will two fans be enough to keep the GPU cool? Perhaps Nvidia is counting on the new DLSS 4 AI wizardry—aided by a healthy smattering of Tensor cores, of course—to carry the load.
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