Will NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 Flagship Really Be A 600W GPU? Not So Fast
It's hard to believe but we're already halfway through December, and almost finished with the 2024 calendar year as a whole. That means we're ever-so-close to the launch of NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series based on Blackwell. The closer we get, the more leaks and rumors are swirling, the latest of which amends a previous rumor over the power draw for NVIDIA's next flagship GPU.
You may recall that X/Twitter user kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) previously laid out some bare specifications for the upcoming GeForce RTX 5090. According to what he posted on the social media site two and a half months ago, NVIDIA's next flagship is set to make a monstrous entrance with a GB203-400-A1 Blackwell GPU and a beastly 600W total graphics power (TGP) rating.
Now several weeks later, the leaker is walking back the TGP claim, albeit just by a little bit.
The slightly-adjusted claim came in response to a discussion about the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and its rumored 350W power draw. Kopite7kimi chimed in saying, "That's why I'm not in a hurry to draw a conclusion, latest data shows 285W. However, 350W is also one of the configs."
This prompted someone to ask if the 5090 is still at 600W, to which he replied, "There might be a slight decrease."
To put things into perspective, here are the power ratings for the current-generation GeForce RTX 40 series...
- GeForce RTX 4090: 450W
- GeForce RTX 4080 Super: 320W
- GeForce RTX 4080: 320W
- GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super:285W
- GeForce RTX 4070 Ti: 285W
- GeForce RTX 4070 Super: 220W
- GeForce RTX 4070: 200W
- GeForce RTX 4060 Ti: 165W or 160W
- GeForce RTX 4060: 115W
Jumping from 450W to 600W would be a 33.3% increase, should the GeForce RTX 5090 actually debut at that figure. Take your own guess on what a "slight decrease" amounts to—at 585W, we'd be looking at a 30% increase, and 550W would represent a 22.2% jump, to offer up a couple of examples.
We could also be looking as a smaller decrease from the previously rumored 600W figure (like 590W, perhaps?), if NVIDIA deems it important to get under that mark simply for the sake of being able to say, 'Hey, it's not a 600W graphics card!'.
Either way, the general expectation is that the GeForce RTX 5090 is going to be a power-hungry beast. Previous rumors suggest it will wield 21,760 CUDA cores, which is 32.8% more than the GeForce RTX 4090 (16,384 CUDA cores) and 32GB of GDDR7 linked to a 512-bit bus for 1,792MB/s of memory bandwidth.
We'll find out soon, with NVIDIA expected to unveil its GeForce RTX 50 series at CES where Jensen Huang is scheduled to deliver the opening keynote.
