Can a Gigabyte 5090 Aorus Master draw power from the PCIe port?
Can a Gigabyte 5090 Aorus Master draw power from the PCIe port?
I thought the GPUs relied solely on the power connectors, but I noticed new motherboards offering distinct PCIe power outputs. Can the 5090 cards draw power from the PCIe slot?
Igor's Lab conducted tests on a reference model 5090, discovering it draws 1.2A from the 12V pins of the PCIe slot, equating to 14.4W. The PCI-SIG standard permits peak currents up to 5.5A, which corresponds to 66W, with the remaining capacity within the 75W limit at +3.3V. They observed the card often surpassed its TDP of 575W while maintaining under 1ms spikes up to 901.1W. The 12V2x6 connector is only rated for 600W, yet the ATX 3.1 standard permits up to 200% excursions at 1200W. This explains why 8-pin adapters aren't advised for the 5090—older ATX standards would trigger the OCP during such spikes. The presence of separate PCIe power inputs on certain motherboards helps mitigate the impact of higher-current cards on CPU VRMs, though this shouldn't be an issue with a card like the 5090 that draws minimal current from the slot.