Now, the RTX 4090, when used to its full potential, is likely to cause your electricity bill to go through the roof (as well as burning itself out), but with the RTX 5090, things are likely to get even worse. In fact, new rumours about it suggest power consumption of up to 600W! It’s easy to see why motherboard manufacturers are adding extra 8-pin PCIe!
RTX 5090: towards 600W power consumption?
At the moment, an RTX 4090 has a TDP of 450W, but with its RTX 5090, NVIDIA has simply cracked its knickers by designing a card that draws up to 600W of power. Roughly speaking, the card alone could completely saturate the 12V-2×6 connector that was originally designed to supply this power. In fact, it’s simple: if this rumour is confirmed, the chameleon will have no choice but to integrate a second connector into its graphics card so that it can be adequately powered.
However, if you find the current cards completely obese, things aren’t likely to get any better. With power consumption on the rise, partners are likely to have to offer even bigger cooling systems, or even AIO watercooling solutions currently reserved for a few very high-end series.
The RTX 5080’s power consumption has also increased. While the current 4080 and 4080 Super are 320W, this could well increase by 25% to 400W, 50W less than the RTX 4080. If we take the architectural gains into account, it’s clear that the RTX 5080 is likely to make short work of the RTX 4090.
However, even though energy efficiency is improving, with better performance/watt ratios than the previous generation, power consumption is becoming excessive! But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that NVIDIA must continue to offer increasingly high-performance products in order to attract more and more investment; you don’t become the biggest stock market player by stringing pearls.
