One RTX 4090 design includes a built-in bubble level

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is, if you’ll forgive me for using dense tech industry jargon, a great big stomping Heffalump of a graphics card. The thing is so big you might just need a new PC case to install it, which makes sense because even the biggest PCs aren’t designed to have something the size of a modern game console hanging off their PCIe ports. While we’ve seen a couple of OEM designs with built-in support brackets, one manufacturer takes it to the next logical step by including something more often seen in a construction yard.

The Sheli 51RISC, a variant of the RTX 4090, is sold in China but is available to buy on AliExpress (spotted by Techspot), has a pseudo-military look to its triple-fan cooler. It looks like something you might grab at a surplus store on a whim. But look on the upper edge of the card, the one that would face out of the tempered glass side of a gaming PC, and you’ll see not one but two spirit levels with floating bubbles. Anyone who’s ever hung a photo on a wall will recognize this as the simplest way to check whether or not something is crooked, say, because it’s so unbelievably heavy that it’s threatening to snap a motherboard PCB in two.

51RISC

51RISC

51RISC

It’s a novel approach to this emerging problem and perhaps a tacit admission that these triple- and quadruple-slot cards are getting a bit out of hand. Interestingly, while the listing proudly shows off that spirit level built right into the card’s cooler, it doesn’t make any mention of a support bracket to actually keep the card itself level. Between you and me, I’d skip the month-long shipping time (and the $900 markup over the RTX 4090 retail price) and just stick one of these on the side of a GPU from Best Buy.