A bold new RTX 5090 appears at CES
CES is always packed with new gaming hardware and this year is no exception. Among the usual wave of powerful GPUs and flashy gaming laptops, Gigabyte has shown off one of the most eye catching graphics cards of the new generation: the Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 Infinity.
This is not your typical sleek, minimal GPU. While most modern graphics cards follow a fairly standard slab like design with three fans and lots of straight lines, the RTX 5090 Infinity goes in a very different direction. From the first glance it looks more like an old school 1980s boombox than a modern PC component. It is big, bulky and clearly designed to stand out inside a gaming rig.
Gigabyte has not released a full gallery of images yet, but even from the early shots it is clear this card is meant to grab attention. Whether you find it cool or ugly will come down to taste. Some builders love loud, aggressive designs in their cases. Others prefer cleaner, more understated hardware. The Infinity is absolutely not subtle.
The important question for most gamers though is simple. Does this design help or hurt performance and cooling inside your PC?
575 watts of raw power with tricky cooling
The RTX 5090 as a GPU is already an extremely high end part. Cards in this class can pull well over 500 watts under heavy gaming or content creation loads, and the Aorus RTX 5090 Infinity is rated around 575 watts. That is an enormous amount of power for a single component and all that energy has to go somewhere as heat.
This is where the Infinity design raises some concerns. Instead of pushing hot air out of the back or top of the case with dedicated exhaust vents, the cooler on this card appears to dump almost all of its heat straight back into the interior of your PC case.
That means during demanding games or GPU heavy workloads the card will be throwing hundreds of watts of hot air directly onto the rest of your components, particularly:
- Your CPU cooler and the CPU itself
- The motherboard VRMs that feed power to the processor
- Your RAM modules and nearby components
Some very powerful GPUs already do something similar. For example, Asus’ premium ROG Matrix RTX 5090 has a huge fan and also introduces a lot of heat into the case. The difference is that the Matrix still includes some proper exhaust venting to move at least part of the hot air out of the system. With the Gigabyte Infinity, the early impression is that there is essentially no dedicated exhaust path at all. Your case fans have to do all the work.
This does not automatically make the card unusable. If your PC case has excellent airflow, with strong intake and exhaust fans and a smart layout, it can still keep temperatures under control. But it does make case design and fan setup far more important than with a more traditional cooler that pushes hot air directly out of the chassis.
For anyone planning a high end RTX 5090 build, that is something to keep firmly in mind. At these power levels, cooling is not just about keeping the GPU stable. Poor airflow can raise temperatures for the entire system, potentially leading to louder fans, reduced boost clocks, and a less comfortable gaming experience overall.
Looks, build quality and who this card is for
Beyond the thermals, the Infinity also divides opinion on aesthetics. The bulky, speaker like front gives off a retro portable stereo vibe, which some builders might find fun and nostalgic. Others will see it as clumsy and out of place compared to the sharper, more premium looking designs from Gigabyte’s own Aero and Stealth Ice series.
One criticism is that the overall look can come across as cheap, which is not what you want when you are talking about an RTX 5090 class graphics card. These GPUs live at the very top of the gaming market, both in performance and price. Most buyers expect something that looks high end to match the cost.
To be fair to Gigabyte, it is good to see manufacturers experimenting with new ideas instead of releasing the same triple fan rectangle every generation. Variety is healthy for the PC building scene and people who want a truly distinctive rig now have another bold option to choose from.
However, design experiments are always a tradeoff. With the Aorus RTX 5090 Infinity, the tradeoff seems to be simple. You get a loud visual statement and a massive amount of GPU power, but you have to accept a cooler that dumps all of its heat into your case. For enthusiasts who love to tune airflow, run big cases with plenty of fans, or build custom loops, that might be an acceptable compromise. For more typical builders who want something that just works and runs cool without much effort, a more conventional RTX 5090 design could be the smarter pick.
As CES coverage continues and more details land, we will likely see deeper testing and temperature benchmarks that show exactly how this cooler behaves in real world gaming. Until then, the RTX 5090 Infinity stands as one of the most visually striking and controversial GPUs of the new generation. It is a reminder that in the high end PC world, raw performance is only half the story. Cooling, case airflow and personal taste all play a huge role in choosing the right graphics card for your next upgrade.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/you-probably-wont-be-able-to-afford-it-but-gigabytes-new-aorus-rtx-5090-infinity-card-is-so-damn-ugly-youll-be-demanding-payment-just-to-tarnish-your-rig-with-one/
