That new graphics cards are becoming more and more power-hungry is no secret to anyone, but the truth is that with the latest high-end launches they are reaching quite striking extremes. This is the case with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTXand the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, which need a fairly powerful power supply according to ASUS recommendations.
Perhaps the 7900 XTX will also have a high consumption
The firm ASUS has updated the power recommendations table for power supplies for the new graphics cards and the results were expected. Both the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX need a very powerful PSU to work. The new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace and AMD RDNA3 series of GPUs, consume a lot of power and you need to supply these graphics processing beasts with a lot of watts.
NVIDIA’s recommendations that it has made officially pointed to a power supply of at least 850W for its RTX 4090 GPU. In contrast, AMD has recommended a power supply of at least 800W, as it believes that should be enough given the lower power consumption of its graphics card due to the design it has. However, this does not take into account other system components, which also need to be powered, such as the CPU.
Even more so if you’re setting up a Gaming PC with a high-performance CPU, which will need a higher PSU configuration to get all the power needed for proper operation. And it is here where those figures given officially by NVIDIA and AMD have to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, as can be seen in the table:
- For the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090:
- With an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 configuration would require a PSU of 850W.
- With an Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 / Intel Core i9 or AMD Ryzen 9 configuration you should install a PSU of at least 1000W.
- And for a HEDT configuration like AMD Threadripper, you should go up to 1200W of power.
- For the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX:
- With an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 / Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 configuration you would need an 850W PSU.
- With an Intel Core i9 or AMD Ryzen 9 configuration, you should install a PSU of at least 1000W.
- And for a HEDT configuration like AMD Threadripper, you should go up to 1200W of power.