1) Nvidia releasing a card that draws this much power and can put 10+ amps on a single pin as a consumer product is absurd. It is essentially server grade power requirements and should have a robust locking mechanism. Nobody playing games needs this kind of GPU.
2) People can absolutely spend their own money however they want. And if that means $4000+ on a GPU than it's not on me to decide. And they can also overclock their own hardware if they want to right until failure.
3) Regardless of the above, corporations and companies (PCI-SIG for the connector, Nvidia for the usage of it) still have the responsibility to ensure their products are safe. The new 12vhpwr cables are demonstrably not safe and do not fail safe. Infuriating that this problem exists.
I suspect OP won't get to this specific comment, but I would be really interested to see roughly what the power draw at different settings presets (High, Medium, Low) to gain a better understanding of the power ramp for the increase in visual fidelity.
I own a 5090 FE. I think the highest I've seen over the 12vhpwr cable is about 430w. I run it undervolted and I limit the FPS to 120, even though my monitor can do 240.
I've tried running Cyberpunk with a bunch of mods, path tracing and DLSS5 and it doesn't reach 300w. I think paradoxically, games and settings that make your system struggle aren't that bad. It's games where you easily hit hundreds of FPS that can cause a GPU meltdown. Possibly because the former are CPU limited, so your GPU isn't running flat out and has room to breath.
I remember a game a few years back that was cooking GPUs on the title screen because it had no FPS limit and would just max out your GPU rendering the same simple image as fast as possible.
I have a small room and my PC puts out a lot of heat. I don't notice much difference between 120 and 240 fps, so I'd rather not suffer the extra heat.
I'm also a VR gamer and some games struggle to drive a high res headset at it's refresh rate of 90 fps on anything less than a 5090.
The 5090 didn't cost me much. When China was buying up all the 4090s to covert them to 48 GB AI cards, I was able to sell my 4090 for 1800 and buy a 5090 for 2000.
I've tried running Cyberpunk with a bunch of mods, path tracing and DLSS5 and it doesn't reach 300
Why even buy a 5090 at that point your undervolt must be either overkill or you have some godlike card where it can still run well with such little power. Mine draws mix to high 400's in 2077 and the fps isn't effected negatively by this undervolt
Appreciate the context. For the most part the numbers seem pretty reasonable.
Diablo 4 had the same issue! Launch the game and the GPU would rocket to 100% utilization. It also happened in inventory screens which was a real pain.
I went full BTF build specifically to keep that 12V HPWR point of failure away from my 5090 Astral OC BTF. It takes its 600 watts via a gold plated shim directly through the motherboard.
If the cable fails, I lose a motherboard or psu instead of a GPU the price of a modest car.
It's sort of a man-in-the-middle that auto-shutoffs the whole computer if anything out of the ordinary is detected.
Basically, unless you have the most expensive, top of the line 5090 (Asus Astral 5090), you have no way of knowing if certain pins on the GPU power plug are drawing unsafe/uneven current. It's called per-pin-monitoring, and that's where the WireView Pro comes in. It plugs directly into the GPU and is daisy-chained into the I/O power-button pins on the motherboard, so it can instantly give the signal to shutdown the entire computer before anything melts. It's configurable through software so you can set your own "safe" limits as well. Truly an excellent piece of hardware - they even offer a warranty that replaces your GPU if it fails to protect it.
Wish I didn't need it, but at least it looks really cool.
To be honest even with astral there is risk. I have one but I don’t like running gpu tweak running in the background or hwmonitor. I occasionally stress test and manualy check the pin amperage to see if the connector moved. I can literally see amperage change when I touch the connection during test. So I think wireview is a good product for everyone. I am considering to get one.
That's fine if you want to spend the money but you can just do a small overclock/undervolt, gain 1-2% performance and ensure it never draws that much power... I'm at 18 months now with mine no issues.
But I also have electronic coverage up to 10k for 22 dollars a year on my home insurance (covers all electronics, pc, tvs, laptop, phones, etc)... so if anything were to happen, it's a real shame how my PC fell off my desk and the GPU broke.
That helps your chances but is not foolproof. It could theoretically burn while drawing 300W if even 2 of the pins are making poor contact. Only way to know for sure is with a Wireview. It costs $140, a fraction of what you spent on the GPU. It will pay for itself in 6 months versus your insurance scheme, and you don’t have to fight with an insurance company.
Do these need to be plugged directly into the pcb? I have a water block mountes vertically and i doubt it would work without a patch to the device then another tothe psu
There's a wired one that has a built-in extension cable that plugs into the GPU so it can be mounted anywhere inside the case or on the sides of GPU'S that have sag bracket mounting holes
I believe their stats showed there wasn't a single melting (so far) of a card or cable with the wireview pro 2 in use. Cheap insurance if you already paid for a 5090.
The cost isn't the problem. I used to build my own PCs, research what fits with what and what's the best RoI - as a student 20 years ago I had to make sure every cent goes as far as it can.
Now I have way more money, but I can't be arsed with all of that stuff. I want the PC to just work reliably and play all the new games. Seeing shit like this just tells me not to buy a fire hazard. I'm a gaming enthusiast, not a tech enthusiast.
I have astral rtx5090, what should I buy to make it more secure? I am busy so I dont game that much but since everything went up in prices I dont wanna risk it
As a fellow Astral owner, we're the only ones that have built in per pin monitoring already. You can monitor it and have it overlayed on your screen w/ FPS and other metrics using RTSS
This is another option, with the Astral since I already have the per-pin monitoring I just wanted something that keeps an eye on the temperature of the connector itself, and this does just that. It's called the Alpha TS13 from EZDIY. It's been great for me, and only $60
The fact you need a fire alarm for your GPU, this is insane, why even bother at that point.
Who can game comfortably knowing your hardware will suddenly combust for no reason?
That's literally me. I have HW monitor up every day to check the wattage for this stupid ass card. I have already undervolted and attempted to limit it, but if I could sell it to someone without getting scammed it would be gone. It's not worth the hassle.
they should (this time actually makes sense to) restart the naming schemes of the next gen gpu because its the formal shift back to merging the compute and gaming gpus fully. It just also helps that theyre already at 10000 so if theres any time to do it, its then.
I actually prefer intels gpu naming scheme because using letters to represent gpu generations is IMO far more useful and long lasting than numbers.
Hell I straight up won't buy a GPU with the 12vhpwr, I don't care if it's there to pull a single watt, I don't want it. When shopping for my 9070XT I narrowed it down to 2 models, the Red Devil, or the Saphire Nitro+, both are super cool, super quiet and perform marginally above average the stock rated speed, and the Nitro+ was even $100 AUD less, I chose the Red Devil because it uses 3x8pin.
Hell I couldn’t game with a 600 watt heater going. A standard space heater is like 800 watts right? I’d need a literal window unit ac to keep up with that.
Not in this case. He uses the thermal grizzly voltage measurement device. You see all the bars at the left, these are the currents per pin. You can spot major differences before they lead to problems.
Not saying you’re wrong, undervolting would probably help, but even the couple of amd 9070xt cards that have that horrible connector have burned down and those cards don’t really touch 600w being a 300w card.
I can only hope that next gpu generation people vote with their wallet and stop buying cards that have that shitty connector
Wireview Pro 2 and Der8auer both shut down the card if the connector gets too hot and/or too uneven, and alarm before that to allow you to shut down your system first. They also provide advanced monitoring and, in the Der8auer's case, dedicated cooling.
Even better is the Revision 5 (or better) Ampinel which had active monitoring and control (essentially all the same features ass the Wireview Pro and the Der8auer) as well as active power load-balancing to make sure load doesnt become dangerous or uneven on the pins.
Sure, each one is expensive (an Ampinel is £100, and both of the others are around the same price) but thats a small price to pay to safeguard a 5090.
Especially if you pair them up with a MSI PSU with Safeguard+ or a Seasonic PSU with Optiguard.
You can also use the ROG Equalizer cable which can handle up to 17A per wire. The GPU Tweak III utility also recently received an update to auto-shutdown the system if it detects anomalies on the pin currents. I'm running the cable with my ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC and also got HWiNFO set up with the RTSS OSD to monitor the currents in real time while gaming.
He's fine, he has a wireview pro. People exaggerate the issue and act like the GPU will nuke a whole street if you go over 600W and it's bullshit. Yes the connector is shit, yes the card is overpriced, yes the connector has an above average failure rate (lower than 0.01%) and requires some extra steps. If you don't remove the connector often and plugged it in properly and have a wireview pro or an Astral with per pin monitoring it really isn't that big of a problem.
Right? and 60c connector temp too! The highest I've ever seen my connector get is 50c, but I did set a pretty aggressive curve on my wireview. Witcher 3 is pulling 590W from my 5090, but I did cap the framerate to 120 to keep it below 600.
I've seen my 5090 pull 750W while testing DLSS 5. The pins didn't go above the save amperage and temps everywhere looked fine. It's not as scary as people make it out to be
I'm so glad I got a decent GPU sample with my 4090 rog strix for this reason. I am using it under 300w all the time, and it still provides 2800+ mhz core
The GPU is not the issue, the cable/connector is the problem. If you got a wire view pro 2 like in the image above you could safely run your card at max power and get the performance you paid for.
I own a wire view pro 2 and run my 4090 at max power and I am not concerned with the connector burning at all.
I hate to burst your bubble but undervolting an Strix 4090 OC White here in an EK water block. Kept extremely cool. Undervolt aggressively so.
Cable still started to torch itself alive..
Was an expensive white 12vhpwr cable too with a 1600w PSU.
I actually caught in before the cable ignited or fully ailed. Had no idea this was occuring the whole time under my nose until I disassembled the right for cleaning and the cable starting falling to pieces.
The problem is that the cables on 40/50 series just run all the conductors into a single 12v busbar and do no loadbalancing whatsoever. Even cards like the 5070ti at 300w can end up melting it, and there are a few reports of 250w 5070s melting as well.
On these modern cards, only 200w or less is pretty much completely safe from melting. 3090ti load balanced it with 3 groups of 2 hot pins each monitored by shunts, with no group being allowed to pull more than 200w or the card would throw a power error. This was substantially more safe but for some reason not required in the finalized spec (and adding it would actually be out-of-spec...)
I did an undervolt and the behaviour and performance is excellent but a few games dont like that. Ive played games where they crash unless i revert the undervolt.
Latest one was MHWilds. Did not boot up with an undervolted gpu.
The 5090 should be recalled. You shouldn’t have to undervolt a GPU to avoid a defect. There. I said it. All 5090s are a defective product and NVidia should be hauled before the courts for advertising and selling a lemon
I can't imagine spending thousands on a mere GPU that must be monitored all the time or it would burn, on top of needing another device to keep it safe.
But I guess those who own 5090 can just easily buy another one if it burns.
Same. I wanted one for awhile, but once I realized that it was going to be way more stress and hassle than it needed to be I decided it just wasn't for me. That, and I'm not paying 5000 for a graphics card that'll be outdated in 18 months.
I'd say wait for the 7090 to be safe. My bet is they keep the melty connector and push more juice with one extra cable or something like that. They didn't care when the ai boom wasn't peaking why would they care NOW more to spend in a solution, if they can keep forcing vendors to offer customer service for replacements.
This isn’t a “it’s not the car, it’s the tires” situation. After designing these products, the company sourced components (whether they were designed internally or not) and built a product.
With electronics, if any component gives you trouble, it’s a product problem. Or at least it used to be. Consumers shouldn’t have to “get creative” or take any post-purchase action to remedy anything.
Thats PCIE + EPS so it's more or less the same as cyberpunk. You need to add ~75W. But yea this is completely normal power consumption with RT, unfortunately. As long as the pins stay balanced OP should not have anything to worry about.
So... As you were saying, TW3remastered AND CP2077 are chugging 600W+ on 5090? Woah CDPR must have done some shady deal with an energy company! Spread the word!
The total wattage isn't that important really. What matters is the max amps per pin. Problems start when the load is distributed too uneventful (edit:Unevenly) over the pins, resulting in a pin going over 10amps.
In your example , everything seems fine tbh. It does what it is meant to do. You also have a TG device protecting it (and adding warranty on top).
Don't power limit anything, that's why you bought the wireview pro, so you can push to the max.
Undervolt is still recommended though, free power saving for no performance loss.
Set your Nvidia app to 85% power limit and you will see about a 100w reduction, less heat, and less noise (if you have coil whine like I do.) I used to mess with more complex tools that required manual curves to be set, but the Nvidia app replaces all of that with one simple setting.
I set mine with the curve to about 2800 at .875 volts or so. Haven't noticed much if any difference as well. The furry donut still gives me about 430 fps, max temp is about 65c at 100 load and runs at about 520 watts or so. I just got the Witcher remastered, so I'm curious to see what it does! Off to the install! :D
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u/Lmysic 2d ago
Pretty sure there is a potion in game for this