The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is already shaping up to be a beast of a GPU given the specs revealed at CES 2025, but if a new report is correct, it could have been even more of a monster.
A well-regarded rumor mill, HXL, shared a post on Chinese hardware forum ChipHell that claims to show the PCB of an early prototype RTX 5090, along with some pretty eye-popping specs far beyond those of the production model RTX 5090 to be released. next week.
According to the poster, the prototype was an engineering sample produced in mid-July 2024 and was sent to AIB partners to help them prepare their own versions of the GPU. How the user got their hands on the prototype – assuming it’s real, which is far from certain, so take everything with a grain of salt – they didn’t say, but they did provide some of the supposed specs on the sample.
This includes the GPU SKU of GB202-200-A1, a CUDA core count of 24,576 (or about 13% more than the 21,760 in the production RTX 5090), a slightly higher clock speed of 2,100MHz base and 2,514MHz boost, and slightly faster GDDR7 memory modules clocked at 32 Gbps (compared to 28 Gbps chips in production RTX 5090). These would have pushed the card’s memory bandwidth to 2TB/s instead of 1.79TB/s for the production 5090.
Also, given the CUDA core count, we can extrapolate that there would have been 192 SMs for the GPU, so 192 ray-tracing cores and 768 Tensor cores for AI workloads.
However, the most incredible spec is the 800W TDP, which is almost double the power consumption of the RTX 4090 and around 40% more than the RTX 5090. As such, it would require two 12VHPWR connectors to supply enough power to the card.
Could it be a Blackwell Titan RTX?
As our friends at Tom’s Hardware note, this card could also fit the specs of a Titan RTX card built on Blackwell or an RTX 5090 Ti. We haven’t seen a Titan RTX since the Turing era, although the argument can be made (and has) that the RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 graphics cards are the successors to the old Titan RTX cards, and it’s certainly possible that an RTX 5090 TI could have that kind of increased specs.
Personally, if the GPU sent to ChipHell is legitimately an early engineering sample of the RTX 5090 that has made it to production, I think it’s simply that: a sample. It would be analogous to a first- or second-draft GPU before you refine the architecture down to the RTX 5090, which goes on sale next week.
While it’s interesting to see some behind-the-scenes engineering compared to the actual production model, in the end, it’s probably not much more than that.
