Nvidia could have big plans to (literally) power RTX 5000 GPUs – but a new rumor may have you worried your power supply isn’t good enough
If a leak is to be believed, Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell graphics cards could use a lot more power than its current Lovelace GPUs.
Note that this is not a simple leak, but a leak that comes from an anonymous source via a hardware leaker. It appears to be a mistake by the manufacturer of the power supply Seasonic.
Seasonic, a trusted name in the PSU market, has a wattage calculator on the website, where you can enter all of your PC’s components to get a total power consumption result. (This will tell you approximately how many watts your computer needs, and Seasonic can then recommend power supplies it sells that can handle that usage.)
Interestingly, Seasonic used to list Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs as options in this wattage calculator (though they’ve now been removed). Once a calculation has been performed and saved, Seasonic offers it as a downloadable text file.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting: in that text file, TDPs were given for those RTX 5000 graphics cards, from the RTX 5090 all the way up to the RTX 5050. So this appears to be an unintentional (rather thoughtless) leak of these power consumption figures via the calculator (as noted by Video cardzAnd Olrak29 on X).
If the information is correct (and it may not be), the flagship RTX 5090 is specified at 500W, which is 50W more than the RTX 4090.
The rest of the range sees smaller increases of 30W for the RTX 5080 (with an apparent TDP of 350W), followed by the RTX 5070 with a 20W increase compared to its predecessor (with a TDP of 220W). The biggest increase comes for the RTX 5060 with a 55W increase (to 170W), while the RTX 5050, for which there is no desktop equivalent for the Lovelace, is said to be 100W.
Apparently all of these graphics cards are set to use the 16-pin power connector.
Analysis: There are a lot of rumors going around
So what does all this mean for Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs? Well, it’s time for a reality check for starters, because Seasonic may have added placeholder details for these RTX 5000 graphics cards – or it could have used information that Nvidia provided a while back that is no longer accurate. Just be aware that the quoted wattages may not be accurate.
Assuming those leaked power specs are entirely accurate, it’s no surprise that the RTX 5090 could use 50W more power than its predecessor. After all, we’ve speculated that the next-gen flagship could see a 50% or even 70% performance boost compared to the RTX 4090 – with clock speeds that could be a lot faster (and we mean a lot faster). lot) – so of course that would all be reflected in higher power demand, right? After all, Nvidia can’t do much with generation efficiency gains – right?
If some of the above rumors are true, then it would be very good indeed to limit it to a mere 50W increase for the Blackwell flagship. What’s a little odd here though is another thread that recently started to circulate through the rumor mill, that the RTX 5090 will be much slimmer – miraculously slim, in fact, and this flies in the face of all of the above. Some sources have got it wrong somewhere – unless Nvidia has really been working miracles behind the scenes – and it remains to be seen where the errors lie.
If you recall, the RTX 5090 and 5080 are the Blackwell GPUs that are rumored to be releasing this year, while the RTX 5070 and below aren’t due out until 2025 – and perhaps not even early next year, if other rumors turn out to be true. Given that they’re still a ways off, we’d take the power consumption figures for the RTX 5070 and 5060 graphics cards with even more experience – the truth is, Nvidia itself may not have figured out how much juice to feed those GPUs yet. If the RTX 5060 ramps things up as suggested, though, that’d be quite the revelation – and it could be a big upgrade over the 4060 in that case.
One final point about the 16-pin power connector: this is being used across the entire RTX 5000 series, a rumor we’ve heard before . Why would Nvidia do this? Essentially, because this is set to become the new industry standard (the more secure incarnation of which is the 12V 2×6 connector – as opposed to the original 12VHPWR). So it makes sense that Team Green would move to 16-pin connectors everywhere to standardize board designs and save on supply chain costs (as we discuss in more detail here).
The annoying thing for consumers, however, is that older power supplies will need an adapter to make the new 16-pin connector work, which will increase the price of one of the best new GPUs. That’s not ideal when it comes to a more affordable model like the RTX 5060, or the budget RTX 5050 if there actually is one.
Of course, additional power draw will also add a bit to running costs over time (electricity consumption), and higher TDPs for devices like the RTX 5060 may also force people to upgrade the PSU, potentially (even more cost and hassle). Let’s not get too far into this speculation just yet, because as noted, especially lower down in the Blackwell range, we’re far from convinced by these numbers.