PCWorld
Modern high-end graphics cards are ridiculous. Incredible performance and awesome features, but also extra demanding when it comes to power draw and physical size. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 , for example, is a gigantic card—especially non-Founders Editions—and the RTX 5080 isn’t far off. Even last-generation flagships like the RTX 4090 and AMD’s Radeon RX 7900XTX are absolute chonkers. That sheer size takes up a lot of space in PC cases, making clearance difficult. It means covering up otherwise useful parts of your motherboard: PCIe slots, batteries, USB headers, M.2 SSD mounts, jumpers, the works. It also means less room for clean cables. But what if high-power GPUs didn’t need to be quite so ridiculous? Jon Martindale / Foundry PNY sent me its new $1,400 GeForce RTX 5080 Slim OC edition and this thing isn’t some quad-slot monster—it’s a svelte dual-slot design. It’s taller than your average card, extending its heatsink fins vertically to make up for the lack of lateral spacing. But it’s an otherwise equivalent high-end card. Indeed, it’s even factory overclocked to run faster than a standard RTX 5080. Big GPUs block more than you think While performance is important, what really intrigued me about the RTX 5080 Slim is the space saved. Here’s a card that grants near-flagship-level performance without being an enormous hog. If you’ve never handled an RTX 4090 or third-party RTX 5090 in person, I have to stress just how ridiculously big these cards are. The reference RTX 4090 measures 12 x 5.4 x 2.4 inches—it’s a long, tall, and broad card that dwarfs just about anything that came before it. Brad Chacos/IDG Nvidia’s custom PCB designs for the Founders Edition RTX 5090 kept it from being utterly bonkers big, but add-in-board partners made it happen. Such models can reach up to 14 x 5.5 x 3 inches around, and many are quad-slot cards that take up the majority of PCIe brackets. Jon Martindale / Foundry If you have a tape measure handy, consider how big a card really is. It’s no wonder that fitting GPUs into some cases can be a headache. And even when such cards do fit, they still end up blocking all kinds of stuff—and that’s what especially irks me. For example, here’s an RTX 5090 in an HP Omen Max 45L. It’s a super-powerful PC with a super-powerful graphics card, but with its anti-sag frame, it’s utterly gigantic. It runs from the rear of the case to the front and it blocks the entire bottom half of the motherboard: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Jon Martindale / Foundry You can’t see it here, but there’s a PCIe x4 slot and the motherboard battery under there. It’s also blocking all access to the wireless module, covering an entire M.2 slot with attached drive, and makes it extremely fiddly to adjust USB port mounts and the CMOS jumper. Jon Martindale / Foundry This is a problem I’ve also experienced with my Radeon RX 7900 XTX , another big and bulky GPU. Mine’s the Red Devil version, so even the cooler on it is especially chunky, and the whole thing measures nearly 14 x 5.8 x 2.9 inches around. It doesn’t quite dominate my motherboard as much as the RTX 5090—there are no immediate slots blocked on this board—but the clearance is an utter pain. Red Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX Jon Martindale / Foundry You can see how it blocks easy access to the M.2 heatspreader screw and how it makes the secondary x16 slot almost unusable due to how close it sits to the 7900 XTX’s fans. This is even more pronounced with my RX 7900 XT, which has the same Red Devil cooler design and same measurements, but this one’s fitted in a Mini-ITX Corsair 2000D case and it only just scrapes its way in. Red Devil Radeon RX 7900 XT in a Corsair 2000D case Jon Martindale / Foundry It’s functional, but just angling the card into the case is tricky. Routing cables is difficult in ITX cases at the best of times, but with a chunky card like this it’s doubly troublesome. At least there aren’t any clearance issues with second PCIe slots on a motherboard like this, but it would still be a much easier build with a GPU that wasn’t 90 percent heatsink. Cable management would also be easier with more negative space. What a dual-slot card actually frees up The PNY RTX 5080 Slim is still a big card compared to most, but it distributes its size in a different way than other high-end graphics cards do, maximizing its cooling potential without becoming a brick. It’s 11.8 inches long and 5.9 inches wide, which isn’t too much smaller than its chunkier bigger brothers, but it stands apart with its thickness. At just 1.6 inches, it’s genuinely a dual-slot card—and that had me excited for just how much extra space I’d have to work with if I replaced some of these monster GPUs with it. Breaking out the HP Omen Max 45L again, I removed the gargantuan RTX 5090 and replaced it with the RTX 5080 Slim. Lo and behold, suddenly I had access to a range of ports and slots again. Jon Martindale / Foundry Jon Martindale / Foundry The Wi-Fi module is within easy reach, the PCIe x4 slot is usable, I can freely access the CMOS jumper and USB headers without skinning my hand on the heatsink. I can’t quite get to the SSD or the battery, but at least I know they’re there with this card in place. With the RTX 5090, it was a case of remove it and see. Jon Martindale / Foundry The effect was similar—though less dramatic—with the RX 7900 XTX. Switching that out with the RTX 5080 Slim made the secondary x16 and tiny x1 slots far more viable, and it made accessing the screws for the M.2 SSD heatspreader much easier. Jon Martindale / Foundry In the Mini-ITX case, the RTX 5080 Slim opens up much needed breathing room over the 7900 XT I had in there. It eases cable management, and the recessed 12V-2×6 power socket also lets you route power cables in from above, which is a neat touch. Still great performance at a great price If you really want bleeding-edge performance and a trim design, you could always opt for Nvidia’s Founders Edition RTX 5090—if stock of that card existed anywhere in the world. And if you were to find it on sale, good luck getting it for anything less than $4,000. Then there are standard-sized RTX 5080s that are several hundred dollars more expensive and take up as much as four slots for the trouble. The PNY RTX 5080, though? A true dual-slot graphics card with RTX 4090-like performance and multi-frame gen support? It’s just $1,400 right now . Not some vague MSRP that the card will never hit. If I were buying a brand-new high-end GPU right now, it’d be this skinny one.
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