This hardware leak by Olrak20_ The Account I Privet on X (what we used to call Twitter) has given way to the pictures that show what seems like a blower-style version of NVIDIA's mighty RTX 5090 graphics card. The pictures appear to show more than just rendering; the photos seem to show a whole lot of these units, boxed and looking ready to ship from some facility in China.
However, which is really grabbing the attention of many, is a sticker on one of the GPUs: RTX5090 32G D7 Turbo. This would imply that these are probably not the newly adopted RTX 5090D but are only going to be in place for the Chinese market. So, what's the story behind these "Turbo" versions?
Why Blower Cooler, Why Now?
To date, none of the partners of NVIDIA announced any RTX 5090s featuring a blower-type cooler. For the uninitiated, a blower GPU sucks the air in with one fan and blasts all the hot air directly out the back of your PC case. This kind of design is usually reserved for
- Very tight spaces.
- Servers and workstations.
- Setups with multiple GPUs packed closely together, where getting rid of heat efficiently is crucial. Open-air coolers just circulate warm air inside the case, while blower cards expel all that GPU heat, resulting in a lower overall internal temperature of the system. It's a practical solution for some situations.
At the end of the day, it wouldn't have been the first time that we saw the much-hyped blower form factor for the RTX 5090. Even last month, a similar style RTX 5090 appeared on the Bilibili video platform widely used in China. It had a two-slot design, power connector on the rear, and an open place at the bottom. The video even confirmed that it housed a GB202 chip and contains 32GB of GDDR7 memory. However, this new leak feels just a little more... unofficial, perhaps even an opportunistic creation.
The standard RTX 5090 is certainly power-hungry capable of gulping down as much as 575W. That's a lot of heat to tame with a single blower fan without letting the GPU slow itself down (throttling) or sounding like a jet engine. This fact alone raises some eyebrows as to how well these cards perform. However, it is also possible that these might not be meant for a normal home gaming rig. Instead, they could either be directed toward such things as AI training setups or other enterprise purposes for which a controlled exhaust is used more than quiet operation or max-out gaming clocks.
What deepens the enigma further is the total absence of branding from the GPUs and boxes at all. This commonly indicates a unit that may have come from the gray market, or even unofficially, perhaps through illegal channels. There are certain regions where there is an ever-hungry demand for powerful chips, and sometimes, a few products have found unique ways tagging them in the market.
For now, NVIDIA is silent on the pictures, and thus, nothing has been spoken about such "Turbo" SKU. Until either NVIDIA, or one of its board partners, opens up to an official statement, the true origin and legitimacy of these blower-style RTX 5090 units remain a bit of a puzzle. Are they actual engineering samples, modified OEM parts, or something else entirely? Whatever they are, they certainly shine a light on ongoing concerns about supply chain security and the intense need for high-end GPUs, at least in regions like China.
