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 an even bigger monster.
A well-known rumor mill, HXL, shared a post on Chinese hardware forum ChipHell that claims to show the PCB of an early RTX 5090 prototype, along with some pretty eye-catching specs well beyond those of the upcoming RTX 5090 production model. sale. 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. They didn’t say how the user got their hands on the prototype (assuming it’s real, which isn’t entirely certain, so take that all with a ton of salt), but they did provide some of the supposed specs for the sample.
This includes the GB202-200-A1 GPU SKU, a CUDA core count of 24,576 (or about 13% more than the 21,760 on the production RTX 5090), a slightly higher clock speed of 2,100MHz base, and 2,514 MHz boost, and slightly faster GDDR7 memory modules with speed of 32 Gbps (compared to 28 Gbps chips of the model). RTX 5090 production). This would have brought the card’s memory bandwidth to 2 TB/s instead of 1.79 TB/s for the production 5090.
Given the CUDA core count, we can also extrapolate that there would be 192 SMs for the GPU, i.e. 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 about 40% more than the RTX 5090. As such, two 12 VHPWR connectors would be needed to supply enough power to the card.
Could it be a Blackwell Titan RTX?
As our friends at Tom’s Hardware point out, this card could also fit the specs of a Blackwell-built Titan RTX card or an RTX 5090 Ti. We haven’t seen a Titan RTX since the Turing era, although it can be argued (and has been made) that the RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 graphics cards are the successors to the older Titan RTX cards, and it’s definitely possible that an RTX 5090 TI could have this kind of improved specifications.
Personally, if the GPU posted on ChipHell is legitimately an early engineering sample of the RTX 5090 that made it to production, I think it’s just that: a sample. It would be analogous to a first or second draft of a GPU before refining the architecture to the RTX 5090 that goes on sale next week.
While it’s interesting to see some behind-the-scenes engineering compared to the actual production model, ultimately it probably isn’t much more than that.
