The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is already shaping up to be a beast of a GPU, given the specs revealed at CES 2025, but if a new report is correct, it could have been even more of a monster.
Well-regarded rumor mill HXL has shared a post on Chinese hardware forum ChipHell that claims to show off the PCB of an early RTX 5090 prototype, along with some rather enticing specs well beyond those of the production RTX 5090 model who must come out. next week.
According to the poster, the prototype was a technical sample produced in mid-July 2024 and was sent to AIB’s partners to help them prepare their own versions of the GPU. How the user got their hands on the prototype – assuming it’s real, which is not at all certain, so you have to take everything with a grain of salt – they didn’t say, but they provided some of the specifications assumed on the sample.
This includes GPU SKU GB202-200-A1, CUDA core count of 24,576 (about 13% more than the production RTX 5090’s 21,760), slightly higher clock speed of 2,100 MHz base and a 2,514 MHz boost, and slightly faster GDDR7 memory modules, clocked at 32 Gbps (compared to the 28 Gbps chips of the production RTX 5090). These would have pushed the card’s memory bandwidth to 2 TB/s instead of 1.79 TB/s for the production 5090.
Given the number of CUDA cores, we can also extrapolate that there would have been 192 SMs for the GPU, or 192 ray tracing cores and 768 Tensor cores for the AI workloads.
The most incredible spec, however, is the 800W TDP, almost double the power consumption of the RTX 4090 and around 40% more than that of the RTX 5090. As such, it would require two 12VHPWR connectors to deliver enough power on the card.
Could it be a Blackwell Titan RTX?
As our friends at Tom’s Hardware note, this card could also match the specs of a Blackwell-built Titan RTX card or an RTX 5090 Ti. We haven’t seen a Titan RTX since the Turing era, although it can be argued (and it is) that the RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 graphics cards are the successors to the older Titan RTX cards, and It’s entirely possible that an RTX 5090 TI could sport these kinds of increased specs.
Personally, if the GPU released on ChipHell is legitimately an early technical sample of the RTX 5090 that has been put into production, I think it is simply that: a sample. This would be analogous to a first or second GPU project before refining the architecture down to the RTX 5090 which goes on sale next week.
While it’s interesting to see some behind-the-scenes engineering compared to the actual production model, in the end it’s probably not much more than that.
