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The Palit RTX 5090 GameRock ships in a colourful box, with a partial image of the graphics card visible on the front. On the back, the company highlights various key features of the card and its design.
Palit bundles various accessories with the card, including some stickers, a small mousepad, a GPU holder, as well as the quad 8-pin to 12V-2X6 power adapter.
Then we come to the card itself. It's something quite special – Palit calls the design the ‘Chameleon Panel', and it's essentially an acrylic panel that changes colour depending how the light hits it. It's certainly unlike like I've ever seen on a graphics card before, and matters are only enhanced by the RGB lighting which we'll get to shortly.
It's also packing in three of Palit's TurboFan 4.0 fans, and these measure approximately 95mm in diameter.
It's worth highlighting that the GameRock is probably best suited to be vertically mounted – the sides of the card are much less exciting, being fairly plain black plastic. I think Palit could have improved this area as it doesn't really fit the overall aesthetic.
In terms of its size, the card measures in at 331.9 x 150 x 70.4 mm, while it weighed in at 2222g on my scales.
As for the backplate, this is a full-length piece of brushed metal, but with a large flow through area to help with heat dissipation. It's certainly better than nothing, but again I can't help but feel it doesn't match the vibrancy of the shroud design – for me, the silver backplate on the 40 series GameRock cards would have worked much better here.
You can also find a BIOS switch right next to the I/O bracket, and this offers a choice of Performance or Silent modes. Both feature identical clock and power targets, but the Silent mode has a less aggressive fan curve.
Then for the RGB lighting, you get a full 360 effect around the shroud itself, while the GameRock logo on the side also lights up. Palit's ThunderMaster utility can be used to control the lighting, or you can connect the card to your motherboard via the ARGB header if you wish.
Power is of course supplied by the 12V-2X6 connector, with the adapter shown above. Display outputs consist of three DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1 connectors.
The first step for disassembling the card is to remove the backplate, revealing the back of the PCB. You can also see just how much ‘flow through' space Palit has built into the card – by my measurements, the PCB extends only about 20cm, leaving nearly 13cm dedicated to unobstructed airflow.
Then we get a look at the PCB itself. It's very densely packed, with no less than 22 phases for the GPU, and seven for the memory. Monolithic Power Systems MP87993 MOSFETs are used throughout, and these are rated at 50A. I could only see one controller on the PCB too, Monolithic's MP29816-A, so it would seem this is used for both memory and GPU VRMs.
As for the cooler, Palit is using a hefty heatsink array here, while the GPU and VRAM contacts with a vapour chamber. Secondary baseplates are used to cool the MOSFETs. The heatsink utilises a total of eight copper composite heatpipes.
In case you're wondering, Palit opted for what appears to be standard thermal paste, unlike the RTX 5090 Founders Edition which uses liquid metal TIM.
