Odd power draw behavior on RTX 5090

drquin

D
I've been monitoring some recent odd power draw behavior I've noticed that seems to be unique to ED, separate from my current library of games, concerning the RTX 5090. I have the Asus Astral version, which I'll post my observation on their forum as well.

When I launch ED, the moment I get to the splash screen, my power draw ramps up to just about 600w with each pin drawing up to 10amps intermittently. Sometimes its 3 pins drawing between 9.5A to 10.2A and sometimes it's just a single pin, it tends to fluctuate but all pins end up drawing a large amount. I haven't seen any sustained amps on a single pin, but I've been reluctant to push this more than for a few minutes before I limit the power target in GPU Tweak.

I've tried many things to try and get the card to not draw so much power i.e., limiting frame rate to as low as 60, adjust graphics from max settings down to minimum, reset my overclock of the card to base settings, and a combination of the previous things. Nothing worked besides limiting the power draw from software. I checked other games for this behavior, but they don't behave in this manner. The most power draw I got was around 560w with 7A on the pins in Cyberpunk 2077 raytracing maxed out on 5120x1440p native resolution.

The simple fix is, as I've already mentioned above, is to limit the power draw with GPU Tweak/MSI Afterburner, so I am not to worried about my card melting its power connector. But not everyone monitors their hardware as closely as others. I'm more concerned and wondering if this something unique to the Cobra Engine and how it interacts with the gpu driver.

I am unsure if ED:VR behaves the same way as I hadn't noticed this issue the last time I was in my HMD, which was just a couple days ago. Which I gotta say, the 5090 has transformed ED:VR for me in a massive way but that's beside the point. Thats a topic for a whole different post.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Elite Dangerous is significantly more demanding, with regards to GPU load/power consumption, than most other games, even games that are much newer and have much more advanced graphical effects. Ever since PoE (which used to be an extreme outlierr in GPU power consumption) was patched about 18 months ago, ED has been my go-to peak 'real-world' power consumption tests for GPUs.

Without a frame rate cap, I expect Elite: Dangerous to ride the power limit of most GPUs that haven't been heavily undervolted. That said, frame rate limiters should work, except at extreme graphics settings where the GPU can maintain 99%+ load at lower frame rates. Once you're below 100% utilization, power consumption should fall almost linearly with frame rate.

Unless the ASUS Astral has different power stages linked to different 12v pins, rather than a common +12v power plane, the only way for there to be large deviances per +12v pin on the power connector is a bad connection somewhere...either damaged wires in the cable, a bad crimp holding the terminal to the wire, or poor contact between the pins on the card or PSU and one or more the terminals on the cable.
 

temeteus82

T
It is a well-documented issue on the 50-series that they have problems with the 12VHPWR power connector. There are many YouTube videos detailing this. You might want to look them up.
 
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