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 enthusiasts can be rookie numbers as far as Gigabyte is concerned, but if MSI is to be believed, four can also be the same. In fact, according to the company, the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Special Edition “redefines air cooling with its five STORMFORCE FANS, designed for maximum airflow. “
MSI continues: “Each STORMFORCE fan, built with MSI’s FiveFrozr technology, features a seven-blade design with claw texture and arc structure, delivering exceptional cooling power and thermal control for ultimate gaming performance and responsibilities. . »
From the promotional material, it appears that the MSI card will have three fans on the top (presumably the intake) and two on the bottom (presumably the exhaust). This is different from what was seen before with five-fan configurations, such as the Maxsun GeForce RTX 4090 MGG OC, which has two additional small fans on the side of the card.
Of course, MSI is also a mainstream brand, which may mean that triple-fan setups are starting to look like something of a replacement for air-cooled RTX 5090 cards.
Which is strange, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition (FE) that Nvidia showed everyone is a dual-fan card, not even triple-fan, and is the same length as the RTX 5080 FE.
However, the FE is a little smaller than the other AIB versions we’ve seen. The Asus ROG Astral cards, for example, are genuine. This type of snoring, at least, makes sense. The RTX 5090 has about 33% more cores than the RTX 4090: 170 multiprocessor Shaders (SM) in the former and 128 in the latter.
Judging by Nvidia’s promotional video, this increase, along with the pretty giant addition of DLSS 4, boosts the RTX 5090 to more than double the functionality of the RTX 4090.
Four or five enthusiasts might be a smart idea to cool down such a beast. But if that’s the case, I still can’t help but wonder how the dual-fan RTX 5090 FE will perform: will two fans be enough to keep the GPU cool? Perhaps Nvidia is counting on the new magic of DLSS four AI, with the help of a clever handful of Tensor cores, of course, to take care of the load.
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Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob’s led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years (result pending a patiently awaited viva exam) while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world’s #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It’s definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.
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