What Video Card?
Without a video card, none of the other components will work right? Our Threadripper 9980X doesn’t have onboard graphics, so a dedicated GPU is needed either way. But given that I plan on also gaming on the PC, a strong video card to play anything I want at 4k would be nice, and with how rarely I upgrade or change out my PC once it is up and running, getting something in there that will be powerful for a long time is needed as well. Right now, there isn’t anything better than the Nvidia RTX 5080, so I went with it, but because I will inevitably need to pull it out for retesting on our test bench, it’s a good thing that the Fractal North XL Momentum Edition gives easy access to be able to swap it out in the future. I don’t need to say too much about the overall performance the RTX 5090 is capable of, it is as good as you can get right now and matches up with the Threadripper 9980X in that way. It also means we gain access to DLSS 4 as well.
The RTX 5080 Founders Edition isn’t fully blacked out like the case, but it isn’t very far off with its dark grey and black theme, and I’ve always been a huge fan of the look and construction of the Founders Edition cards. The blow-through design shows off the great looking blacked out heatsinks on the back side of the card, which will be more visible in our case. Then up at the top, the backlight GeForce RTX branding is lit up in white and will be the only thing other than status LEDs lit up in the entire build.
The RTX 5090 Founders Edition is 304 mm long, 137 mm tall, and a true dual-slot card at 40 mm wide. Our case can fit up to a 413 mm long GPU, but if we go with a radiator in the front that is cut down to 380 mm, which would be an issue with some GPU models, but not with the Founders Edition.
