Thursday, January 23rd 2025
Quad-Slot NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Prototype Appears, Features Three-Fan Stair-Step Configuration
NVIDIA has unveiled a radical graphics card prototype that never reached production, offering insight into its design process. In a YouTube video called "Designing the Founders Edition | GeForce RTX 5090", NVIDIA showcases an unreleased design that would have occupied four PCIe slots, featuring a "three-thirds flow-through" cooling system with an unconventional three-fan stair-step configuration. NVIDIA ultimately rejected the quad-slot concept as impractical for most computer systems.
Engineers refined the cooling approach for the RTX 50-series, developing a more streamlined "two-thirds flow-through" design that maintains thermal performance while reducing the card's footprint to two PCIe slots.
Technical challenges emerged during development, particularly in connector design. The team struggled to create a ribbon cable supporting high-bandwidth UHBR20 DisplayPort 2.1b and HDMI 2.1b connections. Their solution involved infusing glass fibers into the cable, enabling support for three DisplayPort and one HDMI connector. Critical engineering focus was placed on the liquid metal thermal interface material. Extensive stress testing ensured reliability across various orientations, with particular attention to preventing oxidation. Given the electrically conductive nature of liquid metal, an air-tight seal around the GPU die became crucial to prevent potential hardware failure.
Source:
via Tom's Hardware
Engineers refined the cooling approach for the RTX 50-series, developing a more streamlined "two-thirds flow-through" design that maintains thermal performance while reducing the card's footprint to two PCIe slots.
Technical challenges emerged during development, particularly in connector design. The team struggled to create a ribbon cable supporting high-bandwidth UHBR20 DisplayPort 2.1b and HDMI 2.1b connections. Their solution involved infusing glass fibers into the cable, enabling support for three DisplayPort and one HDMI connector. Critical engineering focus was placed on the liquid metal thermal interface material. Extensive stress testing ensured reliability across various orientations, with particular attention to preventing oxidation. Given the electrically conductive nature of liquid metal, an air-tight seal around the GPU die became crucial to prevent potential hardware failure.
16 Comments on Quad-Slot NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Prototype Appears, Features Three-Fan Stair-Step Configuration
Next they're going to explain to us how they invented wheels that are perfect circles.
Just put some proper ventilation in your PC already LMFAO. It's not that hard to keep a CPU cool these days.....