I attempted a thin RTX 5080. It fastened the worst factor about flagship GPUs

Large GPUs block greater than you suppose

Whereas efficiency is necessary, what actually intrigued me in regards to the RTX 5080 Slim is the area saved. Right here’s a card that grants near-flagship-level efficiency with out being an unlimited hog.

If you happen to’ve by no means dealt with an RTX 4090 or third-party RTX 5090 in individual, I’ve to emphasize simply how ridiculously huge these playing cards are. The reference RTX 4090 measures 12 x 5.4 x 2.4 inches—it’s a protracted, tall, and broad card that dwarfs absolutely anything that got here earlier than it.

Nvidia’s customized PCB designs for the Founders Version RTX 5090 saved it from being completely bonkers huge, however add-in-board companions made it occur. Such fashions can attain as much as 14 x 5.5 x 3 inches round, and lots of are quad-slot playing cards that take up the vast majority of PCIe brackets.

Jon Martindale / Foundry

When you have a tape measure helpful, think about how huge a card actually is. It’s no surprise that becoming GPUs into some instances is usually a headache. And even when such playing cards do match, they nonetheless find yourself blocking every kind of stuff—and that’s what particularly irks me.

For instance, right here’s an RTX 5090 in an HP Omen Max 45L. It’s a super-powerful PC with a super-powerful graphics card, however with its anti-sag body, it’s completely gigantic. It runs from the rear of the case to the entrance and it blocks the whole backside half of the motherboard:

Jon Martindale / Foundry

You’ll be able to’t see it right here, however there’s a PCIe x4 slot and the motherboard battery below there. It’s additionally blocking all entry to the wi-fi module, protecting a whole M.2 slot with connected drive, and makes it extraordinarily fiddly to regulate USB port mounts and the CMOS jumper.

Jon Martindale / Foundry

This can be a drawback I’ve additionally skilled with my Radeon RX 7900 XTX, one other huge and hulking GPU. Mine’s the Purple Satan model, so even the cooler on it’s particularly chunky, and the entire thing measures almost 14 x 5.8 x 2.9 inches round. It doesn’t fairly dominate my motherboard as a lot because the RTX 5090—there aren’t any rapid slots blocked on this board—however the clearance is an utter ache.

Jon Martindale / Foundry

You’ll be able to see the way it blocks easy accessibility to the M.2 heatspreader screw and the way it makes the secondary x16 slot virtually unusable as a result of how shut it sits to the 7900 XTX’s followers.

That is much more pronounced with my RX 7900 XT, which has the identical Purple Satan cooler design and identical measurements, however this one’s fitted in a Mini-ITX Corsair 2000D case and it solely simply scrapes its method in.

Jon Martindale / Foundry

It’s useful, however simply angling the cardboard into the case is hard. Routing cables is troublesome in ITX instances at one of the best of instances, however with a chunky card like this it’s doubly troublesome. Not less than there aren’t any clearance points with second PCIe slots on a motherboard like this, however it will nonetheless be a a lot simpler construct with a GPU that wasn’t 90 p.c heatsink. Cable administration would even be simpler with extra detrimental area.