Nvidia's Blackwell flagship GPU uses liquid metal instead of thermal paste to reign in the 575W TGP

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Apart from performance improvements, one of the major peculiarities of the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, which rivals the best graphics cards, is its considerable thinness compared to its predecessor. The company had to reinvent its printed circuit board (PCB) and cooling system to achieve this. One of the notable features of the new cooler is that it uses a liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM), a rather unconventional interface for a Founders Edition graphics card.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition has the same length and height as its predecessor — 304 mm x 137 mm — but it is just two slots wide. To make this possible, Nvidia implemented a three-piece PCB and a double flow-through cooling system design that is more efficient than the single flow-through cooler on the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. To maximize its efficiency, Nvidia had to optimize the performance of the thermal interface between the GPU and the radiator, and this is where a liquid metal thermal interface comes into play.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • munkee_zero
    Not sure that is a good idea. I think that would be challenging, if you are going to vertically mount your GPU. It'll have a similar issue that plagues vertical standing PS5s.
    Reply
  • SocDriver
    munkee_zero said:
    Not sure that is a good idea. I think that would be challenging, if you are going to vertically mount your GPU. It'll have a similar issue that plagues vertical standing PS5s.
    Some of that is due to the design of the cooler as well. If Nvidia has designed a cooler to retain the liquid metal correctly when vertical then it should be find and with all the engineering work they put into the 50 series FE cards it would be a huge miss not to design it that way.
    Reply
  • nimbulan
    munkee_zero said:
    Not sure that is a good idea. I think that would be challenging, if you are going to vertically mount your GPU. It'll have a similar issue that plagues vertical standing PS5s.
    I thought that was determined to be a manufacturing issue rather than the liquid metal leaking during use. Was that not the case?
    Reply
  • bobalazs
    I am curious what kind of issues will these new cards have soon after release.
    Reply
  • markhahn
    Shouldn't Tom's have an editor? (Should be "rein in".)
    Reply
  • DNMgamez
    600 watts for fake frames lmao
    Reply