unobtainium

More elusive than Bigfoot, and more powerful than Zeus’s lightning bolt, the RTX 5090 is here

THIS IS TOO MUCH . It is. This launch is unlike anything we’ve seen. There are no excuses that can be bandied around here—no chip shortages, no logistical woes to worry about, or Covid working from home demand. This is just pure madness. Pure desire. Pure, unadulterated power—if you can find one, at least. We are, of course, talking about Nvidia’s latest flagship GPU.

The RTX 5090 has finally ‘launched’ across the globe, and the demand has been phenomenal. The availability is extraordinarily low. Right now, you can’t even pre-order the thing in most continents; some sellers have stock ETAs of up to 16 weeks.

It’s understandable, to an extent. Nvidia’s 50 series, based on the Blackwell architecture, on paper sounds like a phenomenal step-up in overall performance, delivering an unprecedented leap not only in terms of DLSS performance, but also in overall design. Although still on TSMC’s 5nm process, overall die size has increased by 23 percent alone over last gen, bringing with it over 21,000 CUDA cores and 170 ray tracing cores. And of course, 32GB of absolutely speedlimit-breaking GDDR7 memory, too. It ain’t no slouch.

Luckily, we managed to get our hands on one of the few RTX 5090s roaming around in the wild, and with it in hand, we knew we had to put it to the test. Not only to see how it performed, but if it was as power-hungry as the rumors had it. What exactly can this anathema to reason really do?

–ZAK STOREY

CPU $600

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

Intel’s latest gen CPUs got a lot of heat when they debuted, thanks to their rather under whelming performance, numerous bugs, and poor resource allocation. Combine that with similar gen-on-gen pricing and fewer threads, thanks to the removal of hyper-threading, and it seemed like a recipe for failure.

Fast-forward a few months, and things are starting to change. With the Core Ultra series now having an armada of BIOS and Windows updates backing it, the question is, does it hold up today compared to its Team Red competition?

Cold hard facts? $600, 24 threads, eight performance-cores, 16 efficient-cores, 5.7GHz max turbo frequency, and 36MB of smart cache, with a max power draw of around 250W. www.intel.com

Motherboard $260

Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi 7 Ice

A cheap(ish) Z890 board? Can we believe what we’re seeing!? Yes, thankfully, we can. That’s a clean-looking sub-$300 Z890 board, complete with multiple M.2 slots, including PCIe 5.0 support, a 16+1+2 power phase design, plenty of juicy connectivity, and a decent enough rear I/O (admittedly a little low on the USB side of things featuring only nine of them, four of which are 2.0). More impressively, it’s completely white, giving us a really clean look for our (mostly) white system.

Although it feels like there’s not a huge amount to discuss here, for the cost, there are actually quite a lot of neat features that Gigabyte has included. The reinforced top-most PCIe 5.0 x16 slot is luscious, and controlled by a push button on the far right of the board. The M.2 heatsinks are held in place with latch tech, and the WiFi 7 antenna is a plug-andplay solution as well. Compared to ASRock’s Z890 solution, it’s night-and-day different. This is particularly impressive, given the cost disparity between the two. www.gigabyte.com

RAM $166

64GB (2x32GB) TeamGroup T-Create Expert DDR5 @6000

We’ve played around with some seriously quick RAM kits lately, including Corsair’s wild 8,000 MT/s kit. Although they do lead to some impressive performance metrics for your rig, their real-world application feels a little lackluster, even for us. To that end, we’ve decided to pivot away from frequency, instead opting for capacity.

TeamGroup’s T-Create Expert DDR5 fits the bill. Not only is it incredibly affordable at just $166 for a 64GB kit @6000 MT/s, but it’s also pristine white, with no RGB, which honestly feels like a positive these days. The heatspreaders are slick, low profile, and generally look top-class. Plus, that white finish will fit our overall theme quite nicely. www.teamgroupinc.com

CPU Cooler $170

360mm Phanteks Glacier One 360D30 AIO

For our cooling solution, we’ve gone for an old and affordable favorite in the form of Phanteks’ Glacier One 360D30 AIO. This isn’t the first time we’ve used it, but it left such an impression on us thanks to its compatibility, ease of use, and ‘no frills’ approach to design that it made the perfect pick for this rig, too.

Performance is still top-notch thanks to that AIO design and 360mm rad, and Phanteks has bundled this with a triple set of its daisy-chainable D30 fans, again all in white, and rip-roaring along at comfortable enough speeds to keep that heat buildup at bay.

There are definitely slicker AIOs out there, but this is a fantastic pick if you’re on a budget, and don’t want to compromise on your CPU cooling performance. www.phanteks.com

Fans $90

3x Phanteks D30-120 RGB Fans - White

Because of the power draw and monstrous size of the GPU die, adding a set of backup fans to keep this thing cool was a necessity. In fact, the H7 Flow is almost purposefully built with this in mind, with a 3x120mm recess located at the bottom of the case.

To match our AIO fans, we grabbed another set of Phanteks’ D30 RGB daisy-chainable fans. Identical to the ones in the AIO, the stats are good, they look the part, and are relatively easy to install—at least, if you do it right. But more on that later. www.phanteks.com

GPU $2,000

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition 32GB

This GPU has had a heck of a price bump over the RTX 4090, but Nvidia argues for good reason.