Packaging

The Card

The ASUS RTX 5090 Astral looks fantastic, thanks to a beautiful color theme that works perfectly with the all-metal cooler construction. Most of the surfaces use a matte paint which feels extremely nice to the touch. On the back you get a metal backplate with a cutout for air to flow through and a fan to move additional air.


Dimensions of the card are 35.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 3038 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 75 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1b and two HDMI 2.1b.

Standard for all GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell cards is a new display engine that supports three DisplayPort 2.1b outputs, each capable of UHBR20; and one HDMI 2.1a. Both interfaces support DSC (display stream compression). With DSC enabled, a single DisplayPort on this card can drive 4K 12-bit HDR at 480 Hz; or 8K 12-bit HDR at up to 165 Hz. The RTX 5090 features an updated media acceleration engine with support for 4:2:2 video formats, AV1 UHQ, and MV-HEVC. There are three independent NVENC units, and two NVDEC.


The card uses a single 16-pin connector, which allows a maximum power draw of 600 W.


ASUS has installed adjustable RGB lighting zones along the top edge of the card.


This dual BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "performance" BIOS and a "silent" BIOS with a more relaxed fan curve. To the right of the BIOS switch you have two fan headers that let you synchronize case fans with the fans on the graphics card, including fan stop.

Teardown

When taking the card apart, the first part that separates is the fan shroud with three fans.


This is an all-metal part of incredible build quality that weights almost a kilogram!


The main heatsink provides cooling for the memory GPU, memory chips and VRM circuitry. It uses a large vapor-chamber base with eight heatpipes.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling, it also has the fourth fan that helps move additional air.