PNY and Palit have stolen my heart at Computex with their clean and shiny RTX 50-series graphics cards

There must be at least some people out there who share my view that it’s the underside of the graphics card that’s the most important. After all, unless you’re vertically mounting the thing—which is admittedly getting more common—the underside is what you’re most likely to be able to see. Which is why I have a lot of time for these chrome PNY RTX 50-series cards.

We spotted these yesterday over at PNY’s stand at Computex Taiwan and they’re pretty striking. If you’re into shiny things (and who isn’t, on some level?) they should be up your alley as there’s an inordinate amount of chrome to the shroud and bottom plate.

It’s the latter, the underside, that I personally think looks really great. The top features RGB lighting around the fans in a cut-out figure eight shape, but I’m not too sure about it: It looks a little too much like an RGB strip that’s been slapped on haphazardly. The RGB arrow on the underside looks a lot more classy, to me.

And yes, that’s a Jensen Huang signature you can see, as these particular display cards have had the Nvidia CEO’s mitts on them.

According to Wccftech, these cards are a celebration of the company’s 40th anniversary, and they’re called Iron Core (not Chrome Core? Perhaps Google would have something to say about it). Wccftech also says that these RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards should ship with a special coating to stave off fingerprints.

I’m not a massive fan of convoluted or over-the-top designs—designs with too much going on—but the bottom of these Iron Core cards look clean. I just hope the anti-fingerprint coating doesn’t remove too much of that shine.

And speaking of graphics cards that look clean, Palit’s got one for us, too—although it’s just a concept piece, apparently. This one it calls the RTX 5090 Tornado, and of course it’s signed by Jensen, too.

It’s not a green card, by the way, that’s just the Computex lighting for you. It’s a dual-fan design, and the underside (to reiterate, the most important side—fight me) looks great with the mesh on either side where the fans are.

So, a big thank you to all the AIB manufacturers beginning with ‘P’, I guess. Those are some pretty clean and smart RTX 50-series designs, which is exactly what I like to see.