NVIDIA messed up quality control on their $2,000 GeForce RTX 5090 cards. Many buyers found that their expensive cards had only 168 ROPs instead of the promised 176. This 8 ROP shortage cut performance by about 5%. That stinks when you pay two grand for a graphics card. But here comes something wild – some cards actually have more ROPs than they should!
We tested an ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 LC graphics card with 192 active ROPs. This card uses the full GB202 chip capabilities, running 16 more ROPs than normal specs allow. Our test sample arrived recently, and we haven't finished all the tests yet because we're updating our testing methods with fresh games and drivers.
The ASUS card comes factory overclocked thanks to its liquid cooling system. It runs at a 2580 MHz boost compared to the standard 2407 MHz – that's 7.1% faster right out of the box. We tried to match reference speeds for fair testing. Even then, the better cooling helps this card maintain higher speeds during use. Our tests across several games showed an 8% performance gain over the regular RTX 5090.
We believe some performance gains come from those extra ROPs. The math seems interesting – losing 8 ROPs caused a 5% drop, but gaining 16 ROPs only added 8% speed. Other factors like cooling and power limits affect this equation. At factory settings, our sample ran 12% faster than standard cards, making it closer to what a theoretical RTX 5090 Ti might deliver. For comparison, the air-cooled version of this card only gained 5% over standard models.
How did NVIDIA make this mistake? We think it relates to their recent RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell card. That professional model uses almost the full GB202 chip with all 192 ROPs enabled plus 188 SMs totaling 24064 shaders. NVIDIA probably messed up when setting which parts of the chip to disable. Some chips lost more ROPs than planned; others kept more. We confirmed our ASUS sample has 192 ROPs, but other brands might have these extra-powerful chips. This might even affect other RTX 50 series cards.
You can check your ROP count using TechPowerUp GPU-Z software. It reads the actual hardware through driver connections rather than using preset values. We recently updated the program to prevent it from showing incorrect values on computers without NVIDIA drivers installed. What should you do if your RTX 5090 shows 192 ROPs? Nothing! Consider yourself lucky, and enjoy the free performance boost. Maybe try breaking some overclocking records since your card acts like it has extreme cooling upgrades. Let's hope NVIDIA doesn't recall these special cards or start charging extra for them.
We tested an ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 LC graphics card with 192 active ROPs. This card uses the full GB202 chip capabilities, running 16 more ROPs than normal specs allow. Our test sample arrived recently, and we haven't finished all the tests yet because we're updating our testing methods with fresh games and drivers.
The ASUS card comes factory overclocked thanks to its liquid cooling system. It runs at a 2580 MHz boost compared to the standard 2407 MHz – that's 7.1% faster right out of the box. We tried to match reference speeds for fair testing. Even then, the better cooling helps this card maintain higher speeds during use. Our tests across several games showed an 8% performance gain over the regular RTX 5090.
We believe some performance gains come from those extra ROPs. The math seems interesting – losing 8 ROPs caused a 5% drop, but gaining 16 ROPs only added 8% speed. Other factors like cooling and power limits affect this equation. At factory settings, our sample ran 12% faster than standard cards, making it closer to what a theoretical RTX 5090 Ti might deliver. For comparison, the air-cooled version of this card only gained 5% over standard models.
How did NVIDIA make this mistake? We think it relates to their recent RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell card. That professional model uses almost the full GB202 chip with all 192 ROPs enabled plus 188 SMs totaling 24064 shaders. NVIDIA probably messed up when setting which parts of the chip to disable. Some chips lost more ROPs than planned; others kept more. We confirmed our ASUS sample has 192 ROPs, but other brands might have these extra-powerful chips. This might even affect other RTX 50 series cards.
You can check your ROP count using TechPowerUp GPU-Z software. It reads the actual hardware through driver connections rather than using preset values. We recently updated the program to prevent it from showing incorrect values on computers without NVIDIA drivers installed. What should you do if your RTX 5090 shows 192 ROPs? Nothing! Consider yourself lucky, and enjoy the free performance boost. Maybe try breaking some overclocking records since your card acts like it has extreme cooling upgrades. Let's hope NVIDIA doesn't recall these special cards or start charging extra for them.
