You probably won't be able to afford it but Gigabyte's new Aorus RTX 5090 Infinity card is so damn ugly, you'll be demanding payment just to tarnish your rig with one
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The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is where tech vendors like to go ape with new products, as well as showcase their regular updates and fresh models. When it comes to graphics cards, though, they tend to be all very much of the same design and look. Which is possibly why Gigabyte's designers have just a tad…unusual… with their new RTX 5090 graphics card.
Specifically, it's the Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 Infinity. As GPU names go, that's actually very understated, which is the polar opposite of the card's appearance. Gigabyte isn't offering a full suite of images for the card just yet, but I don't think it's going to look any better from a different angle.
And even if it did, you're never really going to see those angles once it's installed inside your gaming PC.
It immediately gave me the impression of an 1980s beatbox: a hulking cassette player, with bulbous speakers to annoy your friends and family with. I hope, for the sake of anyone considering buying it, that the cooling is absolutely sublime, to make the looks worth it, but I have my doubts. For a start, they just dump the hot air into your PC case.
There's no exhaust venting of any kind, so at full throttle, the Gigabyte card is going to be flinging 575 W of heat right onto everything directly above the graphics card. If you've got decent airflow going on through the case, then it might not be so bad, but that's still a shedload of heat for your CPU, its VRMs, and your RAM modules to deal with.
It's not the only graphics card to do this, of course. For example, Asus' monstrously expensive ROG Matrix RTX 5090 has an enormous fan blasting hot air into your case, but at least it has a modicum of exhaust venting to offset this somewhat. With the Gigabyte Infinity, you've got no option but to deal with it.
Now, I know that looks are an entirely subjective thing, and what's a horrendous eyesore to me will be absolutely fine for countless other people. But to me, the whole design just looks… well… cheap, which no RTX 5090 should appear as, given that they are the very epitome of an antithesis to cheap.
Gigabyte has designed some lovely-looking graphics cards: its Aero and Stealth Ice models are especially nice, if somewhat traditional. And I like the fact that the company is willing to try something different, because variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes. It's just that this spice feels like a pepper spray in my eyes.