Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards are slated to hit shelves today. While initial performance reviews have been disappointing for both GPUs, YouTuber der8auer reported issues with his review sample of the RTX 5080 FE, including boot failures and unexpected crashes when operating in PCIe Gen 5.0 mode. On further investigation, Igor's Lab discussed this particular problem, and the cause might boil down to Nvidia's choice of a multi-PCB design for its Founders Edition models.
Cramming 575W of power inside a dual-slot package for the RTX 5090 required some creative engineering solutions. For starters, the RTX 5090 FE features three PCBs rather than one large PCB, one for the PCIe 5.0 x16 connector, one for the video ports, and the main PCB hosting the GB202 package, GDDR7 memory, and power delivery circuitry. We suspect these modular boards have been connected via ribbon cables to not interfere with cooling.
