Nvidia’s new lineup of Blackwell GeForce gaming GPUs will reportedly consume more power than their predecessors, according to the latest leak. Not only that, but the difference apparently becomes even more pronounced as you go up the chain, with the Nvidia RTX 5090 at the top of the stack reportedly drawing more than 550W at full load.
The RTX 5090 is expected to be released either at the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025, and it looks increasingly as though there will be no immediate competition from AMD against this new top-end Nvidia GPU, giving it a free run at the best graphics card title. However, it looks as though it’s going to require a lot of juice from the mains.
Prolific tech leaker kopite7kimi claims to have received details about the power consumption of Nvidia GeForce Blackwell GPUs, saying that “all have some increase in power consumption, with higher SKUs increasing more,” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). When another X user predicts that the RTX 5090 will draw 550W, kopite7kimi replies “more,” and provides the same response when another user asks if the new RTX 5070 will draw more than the rumored amount of 220W.
Of course, this is all rumor right now, and none of this has been officially confirmed by Nvidia, but kopite7kimi has good form when it comes to Nvidia leaks. At the end of 2022, for example, kopite7kimi got the specs for the RTX 4070 absolutely right in a post on X, several months before the GPU was finally released.
We assume that kopite7kimi is referring to the total graphics power (TGP) for these figures, which refers to the maximum power draw for the whole graphics card. This figure already stands at 450W for the mighty RTX 4090, for which Nvidia recommends at least an 850W PSU. If the RTX 5090 does indeed draw even more than 550W, then we might be looking at a 1,000W recommended PSU for the card, and even higher for overclocked versions.
Meanwhile, the RTX 4070’s TGB is rated at 200W, with third-party cards only requiring a single 8-pin PCIe connector. According to kopite7kimi, though, the new RTX 5070 will draw more than 220W, although it’s not known how much more.
This wouldn’t be the first time a successive generation of Nvidia GPUs has used more power than the immediate predecessor. For example, the TGP for the RTX 3090 is 350W, which is a fair way below the RTX 4090’s top figure. It’s not so much that the GPUs are less power-efficient than their predecessors – power draw usually drops as you shrink to a smaller manufacturing process and refine your architecture – but more that they have so much more packed into them. If these power figures are correct, the RTX 5090 could have a lot of processing power on tap, particularly when it comes to AI and ray tracing.
We’ll have to wait to test the finished product before we can know for sure, though, and in the meantime, you can check out our Nvidia RTX 5090 guide to find out everything we know about the new GPU so far.