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Surprising low power usage - RTX4090

Mattsneaker

Mattsneaker

Mattsneaker

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Joined
29 Sep 2020
Posts
62
I upgraded from a 3080 to a 4090 at christmas time. I also asked santa for a 1000w PSU as my 750w was apparently not enough

Having tested my new setup i have not seen power draw go above around 450w (using a plug that displays power draw)

I have tried it running demanding games at 100+ fps but still get the same max output

I have a ryzen 5800x CPU

I cant help but feel that something is throttling power draw or is this an expected amount from a 4090?

I havent over or underclocked anything so everything is running stock
 
Mattsneaker said:
I upgraded from a 3080 to a 4090 at christmas time. I also asked santa for a 1000w PSU as my 750w was apparently not enough

Having tested my new setup i have not seen power draw go above around 450w (using a plug that displays power draw)

I have tried it running demanding games at 100+ fps but still get the same max output

I have a ryzen 5800x CPU

I cant help but feel that something is throttling power draw or is this an expected amount from a 4090?

I havent over or underclocked anything so everything is running stock
Click to expand...
You got all 4 connectors into the PSU hooked up? What resolution are you running? 5800x is no slouch as a CPU so that wont be a bottleneck.

And in afterburner - what is the GPU usage when gaming? 90%+?
 
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The Lovelace skew is very power efficient and this is not uncommon. If you wanted some verification of performance then run one of the benchmarks and compare to the results in the threads posted on the forum. You may have to run games in UHD/4K to really push the GPU.

My system with a 4080 is using less power overall than my previous 3080 but is significantly faster.
 
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Haven't got vertical refresh locked at 60 or summat in global Nvidia settings? Is the 4k monitor 120hz and VRR capable and set up in Nvidia control panel? You HDMI or DP? If HDMI have you got a high bandwidth HDMI cable? Could always reinstall driver as a clean install so it forgets all settings you may have applied in Nvidia control panel?

Mine draws 650W from the wall - same pluggy thingy.
 
its a 450w card so its pulling what its meant to, afaik you need something like afterburner to increase its max power target
 
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Mattsneaker said:
Update - i ran the timespy extreme benchmark and GPU was running at 100% and system pulling 550w so more like i expected
Click to expand...
The highest I've seen on mine is about 440w for the GPU and 620w for the system while running benchmarks or games like cyberpunk with raytracing without DLSS on. Usually less, sometimes a lot less.
 
At stock settings my 4090 struggles to get over 400w

It's heavily voltage limited, I never saw this with the 2080ti or 3090, but if you pull up afterburner and just increase the voltage slide and touch nothing else, the card starts using an extra 50w and runs 100mhz higher clocks - meaning that out of the box a stock 4090 doesn't have enough voltage to run at the power limit set by Nvidia... utterly bizarre

With both the 2080ti and 3090, increasing the voltage in afterburner did nothing, it didn't increase power draw under load or change clocks - this is because those cards were never voltage limited they were power limited so you had to increase the power target as well and you could flash higher power target BIOS to your card to get more performance but with the 4090 it's the complete reverse, the card can't even reach the advertised 450w because Nvidia set the voltage too low and BIOS flashing is now also dead because flashing a higher power target won't do anythig
 
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