At least two workstation specialists have put supercharged PCs with Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs on sale over the past few days. The most impressive of them all is the Bizon ZX5500 which packs up to seven (yes, seven) water-cooled 32GB RTX 5090 GPUs in a tall tower casing. This is the best GPU ever built and buying it through system builders seems to be the only way to avoid months-long wait.
While BizonTech’s solution will probably feature in our best workstation guide, it is not as expansive as Comino’s Grando Serverwhich has eight RTX 5090 GPUs, but the latter has yet to get a launch date (I contacted Comino for more details).
The ZX5500 doesn’t come cheap at just under $102,000 with the GPUs accounting the lion share (more than 83%) of the total cost. That’s almost 3x the price of MIFCOM’s Big Boss which has seven liquid-cooled RTX 4090 GPUs.
A beefier 6Kw power supply unit plus and the cards cost an extra $85,000 compared to the same system with a pair of RTX 5080 (with 16GB VRAM each). As a reminder, the suggested retail price of the RTX 5090 is ‘just’ $2000.
RTX 5090 GPUs, where are you?
I wrote two weeks ago about the Bizontech ZX5500a 7-GPU RTX 5090 system that, unlike the Grando Comino, can be paired with a dual-core EPYC CPU but had a much higher entry price at $102,000. Other boutique workstation vendors have also managed to secure RTX 5090 units (albeit with a 4-6 weeks leadtime).
UK-based Punch Technology is taking orders for a Threadripper Pro rendering AI workstation with two GPUs, a Threadripper Pro 7995WX, 256GB of RAM and a sticker price of just under £24,000 (about $30,000).
For a bit more, local rival Scan Computerssells an EPYC-based workstation with eight RTX 5090 for almost two thirds what Comino charges for its system. I reached out to them on X.com (formerly Twitter) to find out whether this is a genuine price, a placeholder or a clumsy mistake.
(ed: Turns out it is a one-year subscription to Scan’s Cloud Workstation service, even more disappointing then)
Puget systems, whose President blamed very limited supply of RTX 5090 for long lead times, is only selling single-GPU configurations for now, although I did notice that you can get a system (the T140-XL) with two 16GB Nvidia RTX 5080 GPUs for a bit less than $13,000, ready to ship in less than two weeks.
Other workstation specialists that are selling RTX 5090 rigs include:
Popular workstation outfit Titan Computers, and none of the three big PC manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo and HP) have yet to release RTX 5090 workstations.
In his review of the RTX 5090TechRadar’s John Loeffler calls it the supercar of graphics cards, and asks whether it was simply too powerful, suggesting that it is an absolute glutton for wattage.
“It’s overkill”, he quips, “especially if you only want it for gaming, since monitors that can truly handle the frames this GPU can put out are likely years away.”