Graphics cards are clearly getting bigger, and the Nvidia RTX 5090 may be the most power-hungry mainstream graphics card of the last decade, with a reported TDP of 575W.
Over X, leaker hongxing2020 reported on the RTX 5090’s power consumption in a cryptic tweet and well-reviewed leak copy7chemistry he replied to this with “i RTX 5080 360W”. These tweets were originally spotted and reported by Graphics card.
To put this power consumption into perspective, the RTX 4090 has a TDP of 450W, so the 50-series iteration saw an raise of 125W. That’s a power inflation of just under 30%. Interestingly, the 21,600 CUDA cores reported in the 5090 is also just over a 30% raise over the 16,000 cores available in the 4090. It was previously rumored that it would be 600W, and the specific number could suggest that Nvidia has finally settled on a specific number, perhaps to be shared at CES 2025 next week.
In the case of the RTX 5080, this would be an raise of just 40W compared to the 320W seen in the RTX 4080 graphics card. It was previously rumored to be 400W, so both cards are slightly lower than expected.
Both cards operate GDDR7 memory, which consumes less power than 40-series GDDR6X, suggesting that greater power efficiency is being used elsewhere. For now, though, there’s not much more we can say about the first release of Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture without knowing the details of the cards. We know that the additional power draw is indicative of greater power in the cards themselves, and we can expect significant performance gains as with each subsequent Nvidia iteration, but we can’t fully suggest what that looks like based on TDP alone.
However, we can conclude from this that you may need to upgrade your power supply if you haven’t had one for several years. In November, Corsair announced that some of its power supplies support next-gen graphics cards, which not only says something about the overall power draw of next-gen platforms, but also that the connector will remain the same.
Early in the Series 40’s launch, 12VHPWR connectors caused failures in the most powerful cards, so Corsair’s confidence suggests it’s tested everything Nvidia has in store for its power supplies. If you want a monster RTX 5090-equipped rig, you’ll likely need an equally monster power supply to support it, even if it’s a little less power-hungry than first thought.
