Nvidia's next-generation flagship graphics card is expected to be a powerful beast. In terms of the force of pressing the pixel, it certainly will. But aside from being fast, will it end up as the big, hot, power guzzling behemoth we expect?

Probably not, according to Kimi Raikkonen superfan Kopite7Kimi with a reliable leak star. They suggest that Nvidia's virtually named RTX5090 could actually end up with a dual-slot twin fan cooler. If even a 250-300W card is generally equipped with a very large triple fan cooler that can exceed 3 slots, it will fly in the face of current thinking. 

Now it's possible that Nvidia could pull a lot of performance out of Blackwell silicon without pushing 450 watts. This is the rated power consumption of the RTX4090 with a triple slot cooler. But if Nvidia can shrink the RTX5090 cooler to 2 slots, I can't imagine it being a 450W card. If so, it opens a new line of speculation. Does it mean that the RTX5090 will not use the high-end GB202 chip, or if so, an unusually high number of shader units are disabled?

That's all speculation for now, but I would argue that the dual-slot cooler rumor could be simply an unintended false statement. Manufacturers are often generous when reporting the width of the card. The dual slot card could be 2.5 or 2.7 slots wide, but it actually accounts for 3, but the extra fraction is the adjacent PCIe slot

Nvidia knows it has tested a very large quad-slot cooler mounted vertically. It looks like a kind of cooler that can handle the ludicrous 600W TDP. 

No matter what shape the Nvidia cooler takes, the partner card is sure to push the envelope. There are already several quad-slot cards on the market, and Asus also has a 5-slot RTX4080 with a Noctua fan. More can be expected when it comes to the next generation of giants.

From what we can gather, the launch of Nvidia's next-generation Blackwell series graphics cards is not imminent. There are a lot of rumors, but there are many months left, so for now take the rumors with a grain of salt. What is certain is that the RTX5090 will be a fast card. But how fast "we look forward to finding.