The board, which has been cut in half for reasons best known to its destroyer, still reveals enough of its guts to suggest it was never meant for the great unwashed. More likely, Nvidia or one of its board partners used it to push the limits before settling on something they could sell.

Those four connectors might sound like overkill, but there’s method to the madness. Fail-safes are one theory, especially given how often one of those 16-pin sockets has been known to throw a hissy fit. Another possibility is spreading out power delivery to stop the whole thing turning into a toaster.

In theory, four 16-pin connectors could suck up to 2,400W, which is about the same as two cheap fan heaters going full pelt. You can spot two rows of voltage regulators to the right of the GPU die mount, which suggests Nvidia was fully aware this monster would need to handle a serious juice load. Unless your PC doubles as a server room, this thing is clearly aimed at AI, HPC, or cinematic rendering.

Around the PCB edges are extra fan and USB headers, diagnostic pins, and five video outputs instead of the usual four. Memory modules seem consistent with the RTX 5090, though without checking the back of the board, it’s unclear whether it’s hiding even more RAM. It might even be a sneak peek at a RTX 5090 Ti or something from the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell range.

This isn’t the first time the RTX 5090 has popped up in pre-release form. In January, another prototype emerged with dual 16-pin connectors and a reported thermal design power of 800W, which was more than 39 per cent higher than the RTX 5090’s rated 575W. That version packed the GB202 GPU, boosted to 24,576 CUDA cores, up from the standard 21,760, and paired with 32GB of GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus.

Then there was Nvidia’s own blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal in a behind-the-scenes video showing a prototype Founders Edition. That one featured a vertical PCB, quad-slot form factor and three cooling fans in what the company called a "three-thirds flow-through" design. If they’d actually launched it, it would have been the biggest Founders Edition card ever. Luckily, sanity prevailed, although that hasn’t stopped board partners from cranking out their own chunky versions.