Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 5090 consumes more than 550 W, according to leak

According to the latest leak, Nvidia’s new Blackwell GeForce gaming GPUs will reportedly consume more power than their predecessors. And not only that, the difference apparently becomes even more noticeable the further up the chain you go. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 At the top of the stack, the load should be more than 550 W at full load.

The RTX 5090 is expected to launch in late 2024 or early 2025, and it’s increasingly looking like there won’t be any immediate competition from AMD for this new top-end Nvidia GPU, giving it free rein to claim the title of best graphics card. However, it looks like it will require a lot of power from the grid.

Prolific tech leaker kopite7kimi claims to have obtained details on the power consumption of Nvidia GeForce Blackwell GPUs. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), he says that “all of them have slightly higher power consumption, with power consumption increasing more at higher SKUs.” When another X user predicts that the RTX 5090 will consume 550W, kopite7kimi replies “more,” and gives the same answer when another user asks if the new RTX 5070 will consume more than the rumored 220W.

Of course, these are all rumors at the moment and none of this has been officially confirmed by Nvidia, but kopite7kimi has good form when it comes to Nvidia leaks. In late 2022, for example, kopite7kimi absolutely got the specs for the RTX 4070 right in a post on X, several months before the GPU was finally released.

We assume that kopite7kimi is referring to these numbers in terms of total graphics power (TGP), which refers to the maximum power consumption of the entire graphics card. This number is already at 450W for the mighty RTX 4090, for which Nvidia recommends at least an 850W PSU. If the RTX 5090 does indeed consume even more than 550W, then we could be looking at a recommended 1,000W PSU for the card, and even more for overclocked versions.

The RTX 4070’s TGB is rated at 200W, while third-party cards only require a single 8-pin PCIe connector. However, according to kopite7kimi, the new RTX 5070 will consume more than 220W, although it is unknown how much more.

This wouldn’t be the first time a new generation of Nvidia GPUs has consumed more power than its immediate predecessor. For example, the TGP for the RTX 3090 is 350W, which is well below the peak of the RTX 4090. It’s not so much because the GPUs are less power-hungry than their predecessors—power consumption typically drops as you shrink to a smaller manufacturing process and refine your architecture—but rather because there’s so much more packed into them. If those power numbers are accurate, the RTX 5090 could have plenty of processing power at its disposal, especially when it comes to AI and ray tracing.

We’ll have to wait until we can test the finished product before we know for sure, though. In the meantime, you can read everything we know so far about the new GPU in our Nvidia RTX 5090 guide.