You probably won't be able to afford it but Gigabyte's new Aorus RTX 5090 Infinity card is so damn ugly, you'll be demanding payment just to tarnish your rig with one

A promotional image of the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 Infinity graphics card — (Image credit: Gigabyte)

CES 2026

(Image credit: Future)

Catch up with CES 2026: We're on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is where tech vendors like to go ape with new products, as well as showcase their regular updates and fresh models. When it comes to graphics cards, though, they tend to be all very much of the same design and look. Which is possibly why Gigabyte's designers have just a tad…unusual… with their new RTX 5090 graphics card.

And even if it did, you're never really going to see those angles once it's installed inside your gaming PC.

It immediately gave me the impression of an 1980s beatbox: a hulking cassette player, with bulbous speakers to annoy your friends and family with. I hope, for the sake of anyone considering buying it, that the cooling is absolutely sublime, to make the looks worth it, but I have my doubts. For a start, they just dump the hot air into your PC case.

There's no exhaust venting of any kind, so at full throttle, the Gigabyte card is going to be flinging 575 W of heat right onto everything directly above the graphics card. If you've got decent airflow going on through the case, then it might not be so bad, but that's still a shedload of heat for your CPU, its VRMs, and your RAM modules to deal with.

It's not the only graphics card to do this, of course. For example, Asus' monstrously expensive ROG Matrix RTX 5090 has an enormous fan blasting hot air into your case, but at least it has a modicum of exhaust venting to offset this somewhat. With the Gigabyte Infinity, you've got no option but to deal with it.

An Asus ROG Matrix RTX 5090 — (Image credit: Future)

Now, I know that looks are an entirely subjective thing, and what's a horrendous eyesore to me will be absolutely fine for countless other people. But to me, the whole design just looks… well… cheap, which no RTX 5090 should appear as, given that they are the very epitome of an antithesis to cheap.

Gigabyte has designed some lovely-looking graphics cards: its Aero and Stealth Ice models are especially nice, if somewhat traditional. And I like the fact that the company is willing to try something different, because variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes. It's just that this spice feels like a pepper spray in my eyes.

Best graphics card 2026

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

👉Check out our full graphics card guide👈

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

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