Big GPUs block more than you think
While performance is important, what really intrigued me about the RTX 5080 Slim is the space saved. Here’s a card that grants near-flagship-level performance without being an enormous hog.
If you’ve never handled an RTX 4090 or third-party RTX 5090 in person, I have to stress just how ridiculously big these cards are. The reference RTX 4090 measures 12 x 5.4 x 2.4 inches—it’s a long, tall, and broad card that dwarfs just about anything that came before it.
Brad Chacos/IDG
Nvidia’s custom PCB designs for the Founders Edition RTX 5090 kept it from being utterly bonkers big, but add-in-board partners made it happen. Such models can reach up to 14 x 5.5 x 3 inches around, and many are quad-slot cards that take up the majority of PCIe brackets.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
If you have a tape measure handy, consider how big a card really is. It’s no wonder that fitting GPUs into some cases can be a headache. And even when such cards do fit, they still end up blocking all kinds of stuff—and that’s what especially irks me.
For example, here’s an RTX 5090 in an HP Omen Max 45L. It’s a super-powerful PC with a super-powerful graphics card, but with its anti-sag frame, it’s utterly gigantic. It runs from the rear of the case to the front and it blocks the entire bottom half of the motherboard:
Jon Martindale / Foundry
You can’t see it here, but there’s a PCIe x4 slot and the motherboard battery under there. It’s also blocking all access to the wireless module, covering an entire M.2 slot with attached drive, and makes it extremely fiddly to adjust USB port mounts and the CMOS jumper.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
This is a problem I’ve also experienced with my Radeon RX 7900 XTX, another big and bulky GPU. Mine’s the Red Devil version, so even the cooler on it is especially chunky, and the whole thing measures nearly 14 x 5.8 x 2.9 inches around. It doesn’t quite dominate my motherboard as much as the RTX 5090—there are no immediate slots blocked on this board—but the clearance is an utter pain.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
You can see how it blocks easy access to the M.2 heatspreader screw and how it makes the secondary x16 slot almost unusable due to how close it sits to the 7900 XTX’s fans.
This is even more pronounced with my RX 7900 XT, which has the same Red Devil cooler design and same measurements, but this one’s fitted in a Mini-ITX Corsair 2000D case and it only just scrapes its way in.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
It’s functional, but just angling the card into the case is tricky. Routing cables is difficult in ITX cases at the best of times, but with a chunky card like this it’s doubly troublesome. At least there aren’t any clearance issues with second PCIe slots on a motherboard like this, but it would still be a much easier build with a GPU that wasn’t 90 percent heatsink. Cable management would also be easier with more negative space.
