NVIDIA RTX Pro 5000 72GB: who really needs the VRAM boost

NVIDIA has quietly posted a 72GB variant of the RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell. Same 300W board power, blower cooler, dual-slot footprint — now with 50% more GDDR7 versus the 48GB model. If you live in Blender and Premiere, that’s nice; if you’re pushing SDXL/videogen or point clouds, it’s the difference between finishing a render and killing your tile size.

Spec reality check

Memory: 72GB GDDR7, up from 48GB — same 300W TBP and 16-pin input per NVIDIA’s sheet.¹
Form factor: Dual-slot blower. You can pack four of these in a tower with sane thermals — Tom’s Hardware notes the unchanged power envelope makes quad configs feasible.²

Who benefits (and who won’t)

Do: LLM inference with big context windows, diffusion/video models at higher batch sizes, large-scene path tracing, massive texture sets, GIS/CFD with chunked datasets. Don’t: Pure raster gaming (buy GeForce), light photo/video edits, or workloads where you’re bus- or compute-bound long before VRAM.

The workstation calculus

VRAM gets you batch size. Batch size gets you throughput. Throughput gets you payback. If the 72GB version replaces a two-GPU 48GB setup, you also claw back PCIe lanes and thermal headroom. That’s a real TCO win — but only if your toolchain (TensorRT, Omniverse, DCC apps) feeds the card efficiently.