There’s no denying that GeForce RTX 5090 is the most-powerful consumer graphics card on the planet. However, Nvidia’s pixel pusher needs almost 600W to realise the its full performance potential. This doesn’t mean it can’t run using fewer watts, of course, and the card might surprise you with how well it does run with less leccy (that’s electricity for the rest of you) running through it.
Using the 8-pin adaptor cable supplied with its GeForce RTX 5090, outlet Computer Base set about starving their graphics card. Each of the four 8-pin headers supplies 150W of power to the 12V-2×6 connector, capable of supporting up to 600W. Despite Nvidia’s flagship boasting a 575W TDP, it surprisingly works with as little as 450W and even manages to pump out surprisingly strong performance.
In Computer Base’s benchmarks, GeForce RTX 5090 achieves 97.7fps with 575W at its disposal. Constraining the card to 450W, a decrease of 125W (-22%), only sees performance drop to 92.6fps (-5%). The site was able to go even lower with 400W, achieving framerates of 88.2fps, but dropping wattage any further resulted in the card not functioning.
Keen to see if GeForce RTX 5080 power consumption could similarly benefit from a diet, Computer Base attempted to drive the card with just 300W. Sadly, multiple versions of the card refused to boot with so few watts.
This sort of experimentation is effectively a means of undervolting via hardware, rather than software like MSI Afterburner. It’s pleasing to see that there’s ample room for GeForce RTX 5090 to run more efficiently, particularly given its enormous appetite. Not forgetting the efficiency gains it offers compared to RTX 4090. Following these results, I’d love to see a more granular exploration of how much performance drops alongside watts.
Nvidia adopts more conservative TDPs with GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and 5070, at 300W and 250W, respectively. Comparisons to RTX 5090 are somewhat moot given the difference in GPUs and other specifications but I am curious to see how well these leaner graphics cards perform relative to their predecessors. You can expect such exploration in the upcoming Club386 reviews of both pixel pushers, so make sure you’re following the site on Google News ahead of time.
