The Nvidia RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition in an Ncase M1.
In 2022, I wrote that GPUs were headed in the wrong direction — their price, size, and power consumption were off the charts. And while I still believe that’s true, I can now confirm Nvidia has at least made one phenomenal exception in the size category: the two-slot “Founder’s Edition” of its RTX 5090 graphics card, on sale January 30th.
The last time Nvidia made a two-slot flagship graphics card, it was the 2021 RTX 3080 Ti FE — the 3090, 4080 and 4090 were gigantic by comparison.
So, while my colleague Tom Warren was busy writing his full review of the new 5090 using the best gaming CPU, I wedged one of the $2,000 cards into my own aging mini desktop. I wanted to see whether the surprisingly small flagship GPU was truly ready for small form factor (SFF) cases — or, whether my beloved 12.7-liter Ncase M1 chassis is well and truly obsolete.
To my surprise, it worked: all I needed was a new power supply to turn my backpack-sized daily driver into one of the most powerful gaming PCs in the world. At 4K resolution, I’m typically seeing more than double the framerate I get with an RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition, one of the last cards that could comfortably fit in the N …
