Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 Review: The Energy Hog!

Epilogue

The RTX 5090 is a powerful graphics card, the strongest available today. Still, I would be lying if I didn’t mention that I was expecting way more, after two years of the 4090’s release, especially in performance per watt. The 5090 pushes the 12V-2×6 connector to its maximum power delivery, 600W, so we already see problems with melted connectors and/or headers, even though very few RTX 5090 became available and sold so far. If the operating conditions are not close to the optimal ones, meaning high ambient temperatures, and if the 12V-2×6 cable is not of high quality or it is aged and extensively used (pulled in/out of the header many times), then you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA’s engineers didn’t consider implementing per-pin OCP and OTP to protect the 5090 from overheating its header. This is why we are now developing a cable that will include these protection features. The cable will cut power to the graphics card and save the day if something goes wrong. But this is not our job; it should be NVIDIA’s in the first place.

While performance is high enough, I cannot say the same for performance per watt. The RTX 5080 and 5070 Ti are way more efficient, even the aged 4090 offers higher performance per watt in most scenarios I tested. Remember that all have to do with the games you use for benchmarking, and I used many popular game titles, and with numerous settings. I cannot cover all cases, but I try to provide the most complete picture of the RTX 5090’s performance.

In general I cannot recommend the RTX 5090 not only because it is an energy hog and it can be dangerous in the long (even the short) run because of its extremely high power consumption under stress, but it is also super rare to find (at the time of the review at least) and super expensive. I wonder why someone would pay so much money to get a graphics card like this one and always feel scared that its connector may melt. Usually I am not afraid while benchmarking and don’t have a problem leaving the test system unattended. Still, during some of the 5090 benchmarks, I caught myself worrying and checking the connector. I even installed thermal probes on it, to monitor it, noticing up to 65C operating temperatures on the 12V-2×6 connector on the GPU’s end, with a relatively low ambient, 22C, after ten minutes of 3D Mark Speed Way running at 4K (600W GPU power consumption).

You should also keep in mind that the PCIe 5.0 bus interface of most RTX 50 graphics cards, especially the FE ones, has compatibility issues with the PCIe expansion card that I use for Powenetics, with only the Galax RTX 5080 Ti working fine so far. This means that most PCIe extension cables will probably have issues and the only way to cope with this is to set the GPU’s PCIe bus to 4.0 through your mainboard’s BIOS. You won’t lose anything notable in performance, and you can use your PCIe extension cable(s) without issues.

Without the option “+DLSS” where the 5090 is hammered by Warhammer and “The Last Of Us” the overall performance improvement on all three resolutions I tested (FHD, QHD, and UHD) is +12.15% from the RTX 4090, while the FPS per Watt loss is restricted to 6.05%. So choose what makes you feel better!

The graph below shows the significant differences between NVIDIA’s RTX generations. As you can see, MFG is only available for the RTX 50 line at the moment.

The other big news is the DLSS 4 Transformer model, which is not exclusive to the RTX 50 series but refers to all RTX lines. DLSS transformer models improve image quality with improved temporal stability, less ghosting, and greater detail in motion. There is a relatively small performance penalty, but as GPUs become more potent, we should focus more on quality than performance.

The following table reminds you of the differences between the RTX 50 series members.

The Asus TUF RTX 5090 is a high power consumption and super expensive graphics card, offering a notable improvement over the previous flagship, the RTX 4090, mostly at 4K resolutions. The problem is that you won’t be able to find it at a price close to its MSRP, if you find it at all (at the time of the review). If you buy an RTX 5090, match it with an ATX v3.1 PSU with the proper, quality, high-power cable, and avoid using adapters. You will find the best ATX v3.x PSUs in this article.