A possible Nvidia RTX 5090 prototype shows what might have been – an absolute monster with nearly 25K CUDA cores and an 800W TDP

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is already shaping up to be a beast of a GPU, given the specs unveiled at CES 2025, but if a new report is correct, it could have been even more of a monster.

A well-regarded rumor miller, HXL, shared a post on the Chinese hardware forum ChipHell that claims to show the PCB for an early prototype RTX 5090, along with some rather eye-watering specs well beyond those for the production model RTX 5090 due out 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 hand on the prototype – assuming it’s real, which is not at all certain, so take everything with a heap of salt – they did not 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 32Gbps (compared to the 28 Gbps chips in the production RTX 5090). These would have pushed the card’s memory bandwidth to 2TB/s rather than 1.79TB/s for the production 5090.

Given the CUDA core count, we can also extrapolate that there would have been 192 SMs for the GPU, so 192 ray tracing cores and 768 Tensor cores for AI workloads.

The most incredible spec, however, is the 800W TDP, which is almost double the power draw of the RTX 4090 and about 40% more than the RTX 5090. As such, it would require two 12VHPWR connectors to supply enough power for the card.

Could it be a Blackwell Titan RTX?

As our buddies over 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, though the argument can be made (and has) that the RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 graphics cards are the successors to the Titan RTX cards of old, and it’s definitely possible that an RTX 5090 TI could sport these kinds of increased specs.

Personally, if the GPU posted to ChipHell is legitimately an early engineering sample of the RTX 5090 that has made its way to production, I think it is simply that: a sample. It’d be analogous to a first- or second-draft GPU before refining the architecture down to the RTX 5090 that will go 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.

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