This shunt-modded air-cooled RTX 5090 smashes 3DMark records, unlocks huge 1200W TDP

An overclocker has shunt-modded his GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card to unlock a much higher 1200W power limit, hitting the top 20 in 3DMark benchmarks, all with just air-cooling keeping the GPU cool.

3

Reddit user "u/thatavidreaderture" used his GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5090 AORUS MASTER ICE graphics card and its stock heatsink, as he thinks that it's more than enough to keep the thermal requirements of the GPU nice and cool -- most, if not all AIB coolers have more than enough thermal headroom.

He replaced the 2MOhm resistors with 1MOhm, which unlocked twice the power limit of the RTX 5090, which by default uses close to 600W at load, but shunt-modded, the GPU was reaching a much higher 1200W power limit. He also repasted the GPU and used the popular PTM 7950 and Upsiren UX Ultra thermal putty.

3

At around 820W of power consumption and 3.2GHz GPU clock speeds, he was noticing around 79C temperatures on the RTX 5090, breaking into the top 10 best results for 3DMark Speedway. He was using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D + RTX 5090 configuration, scoring 16,559 points in Speedway. This achievement means he secured the #9 spot on the list, and the 11th spot for Steel Nomad with 17,125 points, and the 15th spot for Port Royal with 43,378 points.

This is an impressive achievement considering it's the only air-cooled RTX 5090 hitting these records on 3DMark, and it also shows that thermal solutions from AIBs on high-end RTX 5090 can handle FAR above their 600W TDP. Thanks to shunt modding, the GPU was hitting 3.2GHz at close to 1.060V, an impressive thing to see as the reference design sits at just 2.4GHz in comparison.