Nvidia's RTX 5090 could come with much faster clock speeds than its predecessor flagship graphics card, or so the rumors say.
As reported by VideoCardz on the Chiphell forums, Panzerlied (a regular source for leaks, but one we must still approach with some trepidation) estimates that the RTX 5090 will run at a base frequency closer to 2.9GHz out of the box.
To put that into perspective, Lovelace's current flagship GPU barely exceeds 2.2GHz at its base clock, so the RTX 5090 will be almost 30% faster than that, if it's a beefy old GPU at all. YeahThis rumor is correct.
In fact, even when boosted, the RTX 4090 typically doesn't go above 2.5GHz (out of the box, with default boosts), let alone get close to 3GHz. So this is a pretty telling revelation.
Panzerlied also recently told us about the RTX 5090 that would supposedly use a 448-bit memory bus (instead of the previously rumored 512-bit bus), which would mean a VRAM load of 28GB (and not 32GB, though either way, that's a massive amount of onboard memory). Remember, this will also be fast GDDR7 video RAM, if the rumors are true (and to be fair, this does make sense, especially for high-end Blackwell GPUs).
Analysis: Contradictory rumors and unexpected surprises
In some ways, this is a curveball. For a base clock speed, 2.9GHz (or close to it) would be a huge step up. Remember that this is the factory clock speed, so the increase would be higher, and of course the overclocking potential above that would be even higher. You can get an RTX 4090 to 3GHz with overclocking (using a great cooling system and the right know-how), so what can we expect from a 5090 in terms of pushing the GPU to its limits, if it’s not that far from 3GHz with its simple base clock speed?
We therefore find this rumor a little difficult to accept, especially since it seems to confuse things with another recent speculation: that the RTX 5090 could be much smaller and perhaps even a dual-slot graphics card (rather than one with three or more).
The suggestion, then, is a much more compact RTX 5090 that will fit better in your PC case, with massively boosted clock speeds. Two pieces of the rumor puzzle that don’t really fit together all that well in terms of credibility, let’s be honest. Unless Nvidia really is working miracles behind the scenes with the next-gen flagship to make it the best GPU ever seen at the top end of the market.
Other RTX 5090 rumors have contradicted the thin graphics card theory, though we should be skeptical of those as well. Plus, with up to 70% performance increases (gen-over-gen) predicted in the past, the considerable increase in clock speeds could explain why Nvidia is getting such a big jump in this regard. So, increased clock speeds might seem like the most likely prospect, possibly, from these two rumors, but we obviously can’t jump to conclusions.
Whatever the case, this won’t dampen expectations that the RTX 5090 will be a beast of a gaming GPU, and we’ll have to wait to hear more rumors about possible specs. We may not be that far away from our first leaked image either, which will no doubt confirm the size rumors, one way or another. The RTX 5090 is expected to debut later in 2024, perhaps in just a few months, though it’s possible that Nvidia’s RTX 5080 could launch shortly before then.
