Friday, January 24th 2025
GeForce RTX 5090 Power Excursions Tested: Can Spike to 901W Under 1ms
Igor's Lab conducted an in-depth analysis of the power management system of the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, including the way the card draws peak power within the tolerances of the ATX 3.1 specification. This analysis should prove particularly useful for those still on older ATX v2.51 PSUs, and plan to use the included power adapter that converts four 8-pin PCIe power connectors to a 12V2x6. Igor's peak power analysis shows that the RTX 5090 is capable of excursions as high as 627.5 W for 10 ms to 20 ms durations; as high as 738.2 W in 5 ms to 10 ms durations, as high as 823.6 W in the 1 ms to 5 ms category, and as high as 901.1 W in spikes under 1 ms in duration.
An excursion is a brief increase in power draw beyond the continuous power delivery limit of the connector (600 W in case of the RTX 5090's single 12V2x6 input and adapter that converts four 150 W 8-pin PCIe inputs). There is nothing particularly alarming about these numbers, and the excursions part of Igor's analysis fall within the specification of the ATX 3.1 standard, which calls for excursions of up to 200% (1200 W) up to 1 ms. Any PSU meeting the ATX 3.1 specs that even has a continuous power output of less than 1200 W will be capable of handling these spikes. It's only with the much older generations of PSUs, such as ATX v2.51 (mid-2010s) that excursions can trigger OCP. Find other great insights in the Igor's Lab review linked below.
Source:
Igor's Lab
An excursion is a brief increase in power draw beyond the continuous power delivery limit of the connector (600 W in case of the RTX 5090's single 12V2x6 input and adapter that converts four 150 W 8-pin PCIe inputs). There is nothing particularly alarming about these numbers, and the excursions part of Igor's analysis fall within the specification of the ATX 3.1 standard, which calls for excursions of up to 200% (1200 W) up to 1 ms. Any PSU meeting the ATX 3.1 specs that even has a continuous power output of less than 1200 W will be capable of handling these spikes. It's only with the much older generations of PSUs, such as ATX v2.51 (mid-2010s) that excursions can trigger OCP. Find other great insights in the Igor's Lab review linked below.
43 Comments on GeForce RTX 5090 Power Excursions Tested: Can Spike to 901W Under 1ms
Stop panicking. This is all well within ATX 3.0 spec.
That said the cable is designed to carry 600w. Anything above that is iffy depending on manufacturing variance. Ironically the 5090 astral does exceed 600w...
Look at the margin compared to the 8 pin, world of difference.
How will power supply reviewers have to modify their methodologies to account for new video cards which routinely generate ridiculously large power spikes like RTX 5090 video cards are prone to doing?
When these power spikes eventually destroy the power supply units that were not designed to ATX 3.x standards, how would those power supply units fail, and what effects should we expect when they do fail? Will they just be unable to start and be dead, or would they spark, smoke, or catch fire? I am not an expert in how power supply units fail.
they getting around twenty 4090 cards for repair every week, plenty of other hardware repair channels report the same