Asus has quietly unlocked more headroom on its GeForce RTX 5080 ROG Astral graphics card, pushing its previous power limit by an extra 50W. This should allow the GB203 GPU inside the model to reach faster operating frequencies, but will likely come at the price of higher of temperature and noise levels.
The brand quietly released this new BIOS on March 14, exclusively for its ROG Astral models with neither TUF Gaming or Prime counterparts receiving similar treatment. Higher wattages naturally require more-competent cooling so it’s no surprise that Asus isn’t boosting the TDP of its more-affordable SKUs.
To put this 450W TDP into context, ROG Astral arrives out of the box at 400W which was already higher than the 360W power budget of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition. This marks a 12.5% increase versus Asus’ original settings and a whopping 25% increase compared to reference specifications.
This higher power budget doesn’t automatically net performance gains but it does unlock headroom to push performance of ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 cards via overclocking. It’s unclear how much benefit the additional 50W will be to the card, but TechPowerUp’s review of its stock 400W TDP indicated uplifts in the region of 3.7%. Here’s hoping an outlet or one of the lucky few to own the flagship pixel pusher puts this extra budget to the test.
Though GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has the same GPU as GeForce RTX 5080, don’t expect Asus to offer similar treatment to that SKU. The brand doesn’t have any ROG Astral models for that card, topping out at ROG Strix instead, and its reference power budget is lower at 300W. Still, I am curious to see how much someone could narrow the gap between the two with some overclocks and more power at their disposal.
