Meet Maggie, PCMag'sBe prepared for a clash between titans—except here, the titans are kin. Take the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, which retails for $3,999. Based on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, this card is faster than almost anything else on the consumer market. The only graphics card that can rival an RTX 5090 right now is another 5090, which is exactly what we’re looking at.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is our current Editors’ Choice pick for the fastest graphics card you can buy, the mark to beat if Asus wants to claim the award for itself. While Asus’ ProArt RTX 5090 model is impressive and can rival the Founders Edition, which one is better largely comes down to the pricing on the day you go to buy one. All RTX 5090 cards are prohibitively expensive and selling for far, far above Nvidia's original $1,999 launch pricing, but they are phenomenal for compute-intensive workloads such as running AI models or content creation. We give the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7 OC Edition an Editors' Choice award to share with the original model, here for a card optimized for creative professionals.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 is the undisputed fastest consumer GPU in the world today. This is in part down to the GPU core’s enormous size, measuring 750mm2 with 92.2 billion transistors, more than double the size of any other modern GPU. (Some GPUs in the past have had large GPU cores of more than 500mm2, but those are older models, and none come close to matching the RTX 5090's.)
Packed into the GPU die are 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 texture mapping units (TMUs), 176 raster operation processors (ROPs), 170 ray tracing cores, and 680 Tensor cores, the last of which help power AI operations. The GPU core connects to 32GB of GDDR7 RAM over a large 512-bit-wide interface that provides the GPU with 1,792GBps of memory bandwidth.
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All of that hardware working together is powerful, but this comes with some downsides. The RTX 5090 is power-hungry, rated to consume 575 watts at peak load, which naturally produces a significant amount of heat. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card did a superb job of keeping the GPU from overheating with an innovative dual-fan thermal solution. Asus’ version of the card has a dense heatsink with a complex network of liquid-filled heatpipes, and the card’s design is such that the fans can blow air straight through to maximize airflow.
To my eyes, the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090 features a more stylish cooler than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition. Aside from aesthetics, the thermal solutions on these two cards appear quite similar, with large fans at each end pushing air straight through.
Asus’ ProArt RTX 5090 also has a mild factory overclock, but it is only 3% faster than the Founders Edition, and its impact on performance should be small.
Asus stuck with the 12VHPWR connector for the power supply, just like Nvidia’s Founders Edition, but changed up the display connections. The Founders Edition and most modern graphics cards ship with a single HDMI 2.1b port and three DisplayPort 2.1b connections. Asus dropped one of these DisplayPort hookups to make room for a USB Type-C port, which is intended as a display output.
We tested Asus’ ProArt RTX 5090 on our current graphics card testbed, which features an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. This CPU sits on a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard with two 16GB DDR5 RAM sticks in a dual-channel configuration, using an AMD EXPO memory profile to set the RAM to 6,000MHz. We also cool the CPU with a 360mm Cooler Master liquid cooler.
We’ve also configured the system with two 2TB Crucial PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs, one dedicated to holding our test games and the other to holding Windows 11 and everything else. A 1,500-watt Corsair HX1500i power supply juices the system. (We have an article covering how we test graphics cards in greater detail, if you're keen to know more.)
I included test results from several graphics cards to compare against Asus’ RTX 5090, but none are competitive with the Asus card's speed. The exception to this is Nvidia’s own RTX 5090 Founders Edition. If you value performance above all else and have an unlimited budget, you’ll want to buy some version of the RTX 5090, as it is the fastest GPU on the market. While not performance-competitive with the RTX 5090, the other cards in the charts are more competitive when considering how much performance you get relative to the price.
I won’t delve into that metric too much in this review, since this one is for the Asus RTX 5090, not those other graphics cards. It’s also difficult to provide accurate standing advice on this topic, as prices have been in flux—particularly for RTX 5090s that were released with an MSRP of $1,999 but are selling for $4,000 or more. If you are on a budget, compare performance numbers to price and check our reviews of other graphics cards to better determine which option is best for you.
UL’s Procyon benchmark is one of the first we have that can measure GPU-centric AI performance on hardware components in a structured way. This test provides only a glimpse of the hardware’s ability to run AI workloads, though. Applications for AI workloads use a variety of AI models, and no single one is representative of all AI performance. Still, this text-generation test gives us a general idea about how well the tested hardware performs those kinds of operations with a few popular large language models (LLMs).
In these AI tests, the Asus RTX 5090 performed marginally better than Nvidia’s Founders Edition. The two Nvidia cards were also far ahead of the competition. The other Nvidia graphics cards provide better AI performance relative to their price, but you can only jam so many graphics cards into one system, which is why many will still prefer a single RTX 5090.
Using a graphics card to accelerate content creation tasks can make a night-and-day difference in your PC’s performance with such work. We utilize Adobe Premiere Pro 24 and Blender to test how well each graphics card performs while processing video edits and 3D renders, respectively.
The two RTX 5090 graphics cards dominated the competition in content creation tests, too. You won’t see an enormous amount of difference between the two RTX 5090s in these tests, but nothing else comes close.
Depending on the buyer, a graphics card’s gaming performance can be its most important characteristic, and these tests focus on determining how well a card performs on modern games with ray-traced lighting.
The RTX 5090 cards turned in the fastest frame rates of all the cards tested, but their speed in games isn’t quite as untouchable as their performance in AI and content creation tests. Even so, in most tests, the RTX 5090 was nearly twice as fast as the next-fastest GPU.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT were both slower than the RTX 5090 in games, of course, but the performance difference at 1080p was not quite as large. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p and 4K, however, the RTX 5090 was roughly twice as fast as the competition. It was also twice as fast while running F1 2024 at 4K.
We measure the consumption and thermal performance of each graphics card during specific tests to gauge how much power each card will draw and how hot it will run. Power consumption is measured at the wall using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, which displays the test bed's peak power consumed in each test. Since only the graphics card changes between tests, this gives us a rough idea of how much power each graphics card consumes relative to other cards we have tested. We conduct the thermal tests using CPUID’s Hardware Monitor utility.
The RTX 5090s are among the most power-hungry cards that we’ve tested. In content creation tests, the RTX 5090’s higher power consumption is more than offset by its exceptional performance. In games, this is less clear-cut. The RTX 5090s performed the best in games, but they consumed a lot more power, too. The RTX 5090’s superior performance justifies this high power consumption. However, here’s why you may want to consider something with a lower power draw: You’ll need a top-tier PSU to handle an RTX 5090, which raises your system build price. With the other graphics cards, you can get by with something less robust and more affordable.
The Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090 didn’t consume much more power than Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition. It did run somewhat hotter during the content creation tests, but not during the gaming tests, and its heat level was far from concerning during the testing process.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7 OC Edition
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Since it’s an aftermarket card, we only have so much to say about the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 5090. It is built around the single fastest consumer graphics chip available today. Its performance is far ahead of everything else, except other RTX 5090s. All RTX 5090s are super expensive and often in short supply due to high demand for content creation and AI workloads. If you are even considering an RTX 5090, you likely want it for one of these two purposes.
Due to the overarching similarity among RTX 5090s, it’s difficult to wholeheartedly recommend one partner model over the others. While you’ll find some with a faster overclock or even a liquid cooler, these often cost extra. In general, we would recommend that you buy an RTX 5090, of whatever stripe, only if you need it for AI or content creation; as a card solely for gaming, it's a much tougher sell. Asus’ ProArt model appears to be just as potent as, or in some cases slightly more potent than, Nvidia’s Founders Edition model. It’s well worth considering if you are in the market for an RTX 5090, even though it doesn’t run away on our tests to the point that other RTX 5090s aren’t worth your time, too.
As for gamers, we can’t think of a compelling reason you should consider an RTX 5090 if you're not also an AI developer or content creation pro. Make no mistake: It is an excellent graphics card for gaming, but its high price outweighs the relative advantage it gives you in games. If you want a graphics card for gaming, the Editors’ Choice-award-winning Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 or AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT are both better-value options. You could buy either one, along with all the other parts you need to build a PC (monitor included), and still spend less than you will pay for a single RTX 5090 card.
SHOULD I UPGRADE?
If you are looking to add some additional muscle to your system for AI or content creation workloads, you can’t do better than an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 at the moment, and this elegant Asus model holds the line for cards with this GPU. If you are looking for a card solely for gaming, however, consider the RTX 5090 only after winning the lottery.
About Our Expert
I have been interested in science and technology for as long as I can remember, spurred on by a fondness for video games. I learned to work in Windows and manipulate files to get buggy games to work, and I learned to build and upgrade PCs for better performance.
In my role at PCMag for the past four years, I’ve deeply enjoyed the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise. Before PCMag, I wrote for Tom's Hardware for three years, where I covered tech news, deals, and wrote some hands-on reviews. After working as a PCMag contributor for a time reviewing desktops, PC cases, budget processors, and motherboards, I now focus on testing and reviewing processors and graphics cards and sharing my insights on the industry.
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