The RTX 5090 might make triple-fan cards look light on cooling if these four-fan and five-fan versions from Gigabyte and MSI are anything to go by

MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Special Edition with five fans — (Image credit: MSI)

Undoubtedly the biggest news from CES 2025, at least for us PC gamers, has been the Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards. There's a big jump up from the RTX 5080 to the RTX 5090, though—a $999 to $1,999 kind of jump—and we're now seeing that all that apparent top-end grunt is pushing some AIB manufacturers to cram the 5090 chock-full of fans.

From Gigabyte, we're seeing four fans on the 5090 with some Aorus Master variants, as the company says (via TechPowerUp): "The premium AORUS MASTER variant takes things a step further, featuring Screen Cooling Plus with an extra air-boosting fan for more airflow." As you can see on the Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 Master Ice 32G, that extra "Screen Cooling Plus" fan is located on the bottom of the card.

MSI continues: "Each STORMFORCE FAN, integrated with MSI’s FiveFrozr Technology, features a claw-textured seven-blade design and a circular arc structure, providing exceptional cooling efficiency and thermal management for high-performance tasks and gaming."

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Judging by Nvidia's promotional video, that increase, with the pretty big addition of DLSS 4, apparently boosts the RTX 5090 to over double the performance of the RTX 4090.

Four or five fans might make sense to cool such a beast. But if so, I can't help but wonder how the dual-fan RTX 5090 FE will fare—will two fans be enough to keep the GPU cool? Perhaps Nvidia is counting on the new DLSS 4 AI wizardry—aided by a healthy smattering of Tensor cores, of course—to carry the load.

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