NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU works fine with just 3 x 8-pin connectors, runs at 450W and only 5% slower

Who needs 4 x 8-pin connectors? Well, you do for the best performance, but testing suggests a trio of connectors comes mighty close to the same FPS.

NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU works fine with just 3 x 8-pin connectors, runs at 450W and only 5% slower
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TL;DR: NVIDIA's RTX 5090 graphics card requires 4 x 8-pin connectors for 600W power officially, but can operate with 3 x 8-pin connectors at 450W, seemingly running only 5% slower in 4K benchmarks. However, using just 2 x 8-pin connectors is not feasible, and in this case the GPU simply won't work.

NVIDIA's new RTX 5090 requires 4 x 8-pin connectors for its power (delivering 600W) when used with an adapter setup (rather than a new 12V-2x6 connector), but what about if you only have a 3 x 8-pin setup for whatever reason?

As VideoCardz points out, this might be because you're short on power connectors, or you just don't have quite a beefy enough PSU, but the interesting spin on the RTX 5090 here is that it works just fine on 3 x 8-pin connectors.

Obviously, this will only supply 450W, so the RTX 5090 will operate at a considerably lower level than its TDP. (Which is 575W, at least for the baseline graphics cards - that can go up to 600W with heavyweight third-party cards like the ASUS ROG Astral (pictured top of this article, though its power usage is nothing compared to the GPU's mind-blowing price tag).

With its testing, ComputerBase confirmed that a Zotac RTX 5090 - and also the mentioned ROG Astral behemoth - will work with 3 x 8-pin connectors, and what's more, these GPUs aren't that much slower.

As an average with 4K resolution benchmarks, the RTX 5090 running at 450W with the trio of connectors instead of four is only 5% slower than the fully unleashed GPU - not a massive amount of difference. And, of course, the graphics card is running at a much more comfortable level here, certainly compared to the full 600W.

If you were wondering if this behavior extends even further, to a scenario where just 2 x 8-pin connectors are employed, the answer is no.

Indeed, attempting to manually drop the RTX 5090 below 400W is a no-go, so it's not surprising that only a pair of connectors supplying just 300W is not feasible.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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