Pairing the RTX 5090 with a CPU from 2006? Nvidia said ‘hold my beer'

Digital Trends

14-05-2025

Nvidia's best graphics cards are often paired with expensive CPUs, but what if you want to try a completely mismatched, retro configuration? Well, that used to be impossible due to driver issues. But, for whatever reason, Nvidia has just removed the instruction that prevented you from doing so, opening the door to some fun, albeit nonsensical, CPU and GPU combinations.
The instruction in question is called POPCNT (Population Count), and this is a CPU instruction that also prevents Windows 11 from being installed on older hardware. Its job is counting how many bits are present in a binary number. However, as spotted by TheBobPony on X (Twitter), POPCNT will not be a problem for Nvidia's latest graphics cards anymore.
UPDATE: Recent NVIDIA drivers no longer require the POPCNT CPU instruction, this means old CPUs such as the Intel Core 2 Duo will be able to install the latest NVIDIA drivers without any issues.
And yes, that also means you could possibly pair an RTX 5090 with Core 2 Duo now. 😏 https://t.co/6GwpG9RrMP pic.twitter.com/v8h4eduVH5 — BobPony.com (@TheBobPony) May 12, 2025 The latest drivers remove the requirement for the CPU to support the POPCNT instruction. These days, every single CPU supports it, so you have to go really far back to find one that doesn't. Some of the last notable CPUs that didn't support POPCNT were Intel's Core 2 series, meaning iconic chips like the Intel Core 2 Duo from 2006, and AMD K10, meaning Phenom, Phenom II, and Athlon II. Starting with the Nehalem architecture (Core i7-920 and newer), Intel's been supporting POPCNT; AMD added support with Bulldozer, meaning CPUs like the FX-8150.
Looking back at the specs of these CPUs makes me nostalgic. The Intel Core 2 Duo was built on a 65nm (and later 45nm) process node and offered two cores and two threads; a far cry from the CPUs we see today. It had 2MB to 6MB of shared L2 cache and maximum clock speeds ranging from 800MHz to 1,333MHz. Not much to write home about.
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And yet, if you for some reason feel compelled to, you can now pair one with an Nvidia RTX 5090, all thanks to this new driver update.
With the removal of POPCNT, you can use Nvidia's latest graphics with just about any CPU. Previously, trying to do so would've caused what TheBobPony refers to as a 'soft brick,' meaning your PC would get stuck in a boot loop until it finally got rid of the driver that made it crash and launched Windows Recovery mode.
Realistically, no one's going to buy an RTX 50-series (or even an RTX 20-series) GPU to pair with a CPU that's nearly 20 years old, but it's pretty cool that that's now a possibility. I would like to see how such a PC would perform. CPU bottleneck, anyone?