More money than sense?

I'm a massive nerd. Anyone who knows me knows this to be self-evident.

I also love PC gaming. I do have a Switch 1 (OLED) and a PS5, but they get very little playtime compared to my primary non-mobile device: my PC.

I used to run an RTX 3080, and while it's still a decent enough card, it was beginning to show its age after 4 years of sterling service. The now-small amount of VRAM, at 10Gb, would begin to become an issue soon, as games start to look at 12-16Gb of VRAM later this year or early next year.

It was also starting to show its age when it comes to ray-tracing and path-tracing games, and was not capable at all of Multi-Frame Generation (fake AI-based frame generation).

So with the recent round of GeForce 5xxx releases, as well as the AMD offerings such as the 9070XT, I started to look at my next upgrade.

I had spec'd this PC with the aspiration of using a 5090 late last year:

• CPU: AMD 9800x3D
• RAM: 64Gb DDR5 6000
• MOBO: ASUS Rog Crosshair x870e Hero

So I'd bought that bare-bones system last year, and put my 5tb of NVME storage into it, along with my RTX 3080. It served me well for that time, especially in WoW, as the upgrade on the CPU from my old 5800x (without 3d cache) was huge. Not just in framerates, but how smoothly the game plays with a 3d cache on the CPU.

So, with the range of graphics cards touted, I kept my options open, with the possibility that I could even go for an AMD card should they prove good enough.

(Spoiler, they didn't)

Power hungers for more power...

Yeah, the cards that came out were largely underwhelming to say the least. Even the 5080 was barely an upgrade over the previous generation's 4090 in benchmarks. The 5090 however was coming in at 60-100% better in performance over the 5080 even. Most likely a deliberate strategy by Nvidia, but honestly I didn't care.

So, I bought one - I mean, why else even have a credit card? 🤣

I built this system to last for at least another 4-5 years, and hopefully that is exactly what I now have.

The biggest concern was obviously the reports of 5090 cards... melting in people's machines. More specifically the cables going into the cards were prone to melting because of the temperatures involved with so much power being drawn by the card.

So the first thing I did when I ordered my 5090 was to also order an upgraded PSU. One that not only would be able to supply enough power, but also had the right connections for the 5090.

So I ordered an Antech HCG 1200w modular PSU, which has a native 600w 12VHPWR socket for the GFX card.

So when the 5090 came, I had to rebuild the machine insofar as I had to remove the old PSU, remove all of the old power cabling, then put the new PSU in and use all the new cables for it.

It took a while, especially as I had to remove my top fan block for the CPU AIO cooling so I could get the CPU power cables out of the motherboard and insert the new ones. It was a very tight fit...

Then I got the 5090 installed, booted up and nothing exploded! Always a bonus 😉

Drivers installed from scratch and it worked beautifully.

The upshot of all that time & cash?

I made sure to install MSI Afterburner, with the express intention of under-volting the 5090. For those who don't know what this is, it's the practice of reducing the power the card can draw which has several benefits, one of which is quite surprising...

One being the most obvious: less heat. This primarily reduces the chances of the card drawing so much power that it generates too much heat and melts any cables.

I got the power draw from a maximum of 570w down to 430w, a better than 25% reduction in power utilisation.

Secondly this also resulted in a GPU temp drop of around 10c under load.

The third, and perhaps more surprising and paradoxical result: under-volting a card, while reducing power draw and temperatures, can actually increase performance!

And this held to be true, albeit only minorly. I got a 10fps increase in a graphically maxed-out Cyberpunk 2077:

• Before: 430fps at 570w & 70c.
• After: 440fps at 430w and 60c.

A huge improvement in efficiency.

Those results were obviously with MFG set to 4x!

Worth the effort, despite the money...

So my 5090 came, was installed, updated and undervolted and is now giving me better performance than the already stellar results it was capable of. It not only runs cooler but draws less power, meaning the chances of it melting my system are absolutely as minimal as I can make them.

Should I have to go through this effort? No, clearly not, but safety first and an eye on keeping this very expensive hardware for many years to come means it's more than worth the time and effort learning how to do it all 😉