Once again, Der8auer gets his hands dirty on a graphics card, in this case an ASUS RTX 5090 Astral LC. After taking a quick tour of the card and pointing out the differences with the air-cooled model, he tackles the OC. The aim was to shunt the card to make it consume more watts and see how far it could be pushed. Result: the RTX Pro 6000 is beaten!
RTX 5090 Astral LC: a mod shunt for higher power consumption!
In broad terms, this ROG Astral LC is a card that, like the aircooling version, features four fans. However, this model benefits from liquid cooling provided by a 360 mm AIO. By default, the card consumes up to 600W of power, the consumption limit imposed by NVIDIA, which cannot be modified with software. To do this, you need to trick the power management circuit by adding, in this case, a resistor. The latter will detect a lower power consumption than is actually the case, and the board will be able to climb higher in frequency. In short, before modifying the card, let’s take a few readings to see how it behaves from the outset. As a result, this ROG Astral LC consumes around 600W, while its frequency hovers around 2800 to 2820 MHz in Speedway benchmarks. Temperature-wise, the AIO does its job well: 60°C.
After shunting the card, power consumption rises to 650 ~720W, and will reach 786W after increasing the voltage. In this second case, the card also runs faster, and the frequency increases by 100 to 200 MHz. And if you add a manual OC, the power consumption exceeds 800W. However, in terms of scores, the card outperforms NVIDIA’s RTX Pro 6000. Still on Speedway, the RTX Pro achieves 157.4 FPS, compared with 146.1 FPS for the RTX 5090 FE. The Astral LC version with shunt and overclocking reaches 158 FPS… And no 12V-2×6 melting this time (we’re teasing).
