at CES 2025 I was impressed by Jensen's keynote about Nvidia RTX 50 graphics and I thought yep I'm going to spend ,000 British p on an RTX 5080 Founders Edition and that will be useful for motherboard and CPU testing and also for PC builds when I'm reviewing new cases simultaneously I was frustrated by AMD who told us about their rdna 4 Graphics before CES and then at CES for some peculiar reason they failed to launch those graphics even though we saw physical graphics cards at the AMD booth and other places so I left CES I
put in a call placed an order verbally for an RTX 5080 and to date it hasn't appeared because supply has been crazy short it's so happens reviews of 50 Series have been disappointing to say the least so I've changed my tune I've switched from Nvidia to AMD and I've been shopping and now we're going to perform an unboxing and I'm going to explain my [Music] reasoning step one is to unwrap my new graphics card and I'm going to take slightly more care than I might do if it was somebody else's as this is mine although
I haven't yet paid for it price is still TBA and packaging of course power color red devil limited edition [Applause] just going to take everything out of the box and I'll see what I've got think this is just pure packaging nothing hidden below yep these must be GPU supports uh it's a thing it can wait here we have a key cap I open you see I say I'm going to take care and I actually break something of my own where the heck did that come from oh see that was the latching mechanism put that to
one side so there we go little key cap with actual mini rotating fans must confess I quite like that a sticker and an RGB cable and then we have the graphics card itself power color red devil RX 970 XT you may or may not be able to see that 987 out of, 1500 which makes me fairly average and let's do a quick peel and apart from the fact it's a full-size triple fan graphics card which means it's going to be useful for case reviews can you install the graphics card in the whatever the heck Cas
is how does it work in terms of cooling these are very important questions it's a 300 watt or so power drawer uh that's also going to be important because tragically I treat this thing as much as a heater as I do as a graphics card but the big reason for me wanting to buy this particular graphics card rather than a GeForce RTX 5080 is the fact it has Triple 8 Pin power connectors rather than the 12volt 2x6 connector that has become the latest thing from the point of view of Aesthetics I quite like these new
12vt 2x6 connectors rated at 600 wats on the latest atx3 ATX 3.1 power supplies however I feel much more reassured seeing two or three of these PCI Express connectors because you've got more cables and you've got more bulk to the connectors one of these is very similar in size to one of these two or three gives you more scope for safety and this is the thing an altx 380 was rated at 320 Watts the 3090 at 350 Watts RTX 480 rated at 330 Watts RTX 490 450 watts and now the RTX 80 we're up to
360 Watts so the 80 series fairly consistent and the RTX 5090 600 watts in other words a single 12vt 2x6 connector has essentially no safety margin watsoever now we know they do build in some extra on top of the nominal 600 watts but we're into tiny handfuls of percentages it makes sense to me for RTX 590 to have two of these connectors and then the 80 and 5070 can have one but that's not the way that Nvidia has gone the new 509s have a single connector and we've seen all sorts of reports of trouble and
that's ridiculous to my mind because the RTX 4090 had reports of connectors melting they have been reports with 5090 of problems and we saw an excellent video from Roman de Barton who cut various wires to show that The Balancing inside the new 50 Series graphics cards is non-existent in other words the connection points for these different wires doing the 12 volts it's a common rail nominally you should be looking at about 9 amps through each of the six 12vt cables but in practice this can fluctuate you might see as little as six or seven amps
and in Roman's case he showed two cables running at 25 amps which surely would have led to catastrophic failure in no short order absolutely nuts why Nvidia only used a single 12 volt 2x6 connector on 90 I do not understand I of course was not looking at 59 for that very reason uh I was looking at 5080 and the other reason the final nail in the coffin for my buying decision was that Nvidia has reported they have a problem with missing RS a single block of missing RS and Invidia says that this affects a tiny
handful of owners I asked my Nvidia rep about this now I'm not absolutely certain whether this was intended as a quiet conversation or for publication uh but it's a work question so I'm going to give you the words without actually just repeating the message I said ref missing RS what percentage of gpus are tested before they are supplied to board Partners or used in Founders cards remember the founders Edition the card I was thinking of buying for ,000 is entirely in the hands of Nvidia they get the gpus made and then they Supply them to
whoever makes their cards I think it's foxcon and then the final products are sold by Nvidia or on nvidia's behalf my question was what percentage of gpus are tested and the response came back we test all gpus this R issue was a test Escape well in the sense they missed it that is certainly true uh but it strikes me as a somewhat unsatisfactory answer uh in fact it's beyond explanation so how does Nvidia know how many people are affected if this is a test Escape Gamers NEX has went to town in the gamer's Nexus Manner
and suggested that the answer might not be 100% accurate basically it is unknowable the other concern is it's not just 5090 it's also 5080 who knows if 5070 is affected in other words the GPU I was thinking of buying to my mind has an unsatisfactory power connector and some of them fail plus there have been various reports about things like driver problems causing black screens and the perform performance is quite unsatisfactory 50 Series over 40 series but a minor uplift so you're paying a heap of money for not a lot of anything and that's why
Dominic's reviews on kit Guru have been rather unfavorable if you're in line to buy one good luck to you but we're not really that impressed by this new series of graphics card at kit Guru and that is why I've given up on the idea of buying a 5080 and I've gone with this powercolor Red Devil special edition graphics card of my very own [Music]
