TECH NEWS – Nvidia’s latest top-of-the-line graphics card needs the right power cable, so if you don’t have one, you won’t get the performance the RTX 5090 is capable of.

The most powerful model in the Blackwell architecture is pretty beefy, but it also draws the same amount of power as a desktop PC (575W is enough to power a more powerful configuration!). So it’s worth upgrading to a new power supply (don’t plan on anything less than 1000W), and consider the power cabling. If you don’t use the right adapter, the RTX 5090 will not run perfectly, and this was demonstrated in ComputerBase’s test.

The site tested how the card ran with three or four 8-pin power cables. If you’re getting 100W less power than the optimal rate, you’ll see a 5% drop in performance during rasterization tests. Tested at TDPs of 575W, 450W and 400W, there is a noticeable drop in performance when you limit the power the RTX 5090 draws. The interesting thing is that the GPU even worked with only three 8-pin cables, but when you try to run it with only two, the card refuses to work, meaning that 300W is not enough for the Blackwell king…

If we try to use four 8-pin power cables, we can deliver 600W (or 675, since 75W is also delivered through the PCIe connector), and this will be good for RTX 5090s from third-party manufacturers (AIB; like Asus), since for example the Asus ROG Astral model beats the ones we’ve seen so far in terms of price and power consumption. However, the fact that the card can run at 450W is a good compromise, as it gives a reasonable performance with less power consumption.

In any case, we have to ask why power reduction isn’t an issue for graphics cards? Intel was criticized for this with its previous generation of processors, so the current models are a bit more restrained. Something like this could be good for GPUs, because 575W is really hair-raising…

Source: WCCFTech, Computerbase