Asus has outlined the official power requirements for those purchasing the new RTX 4080 or 4090 graphics card from the company, as well as the necessary power requirements for those looking to purchase the RX 7900 XT or 7900 XTX when these RDNA 3 cards arrive in December.
Note that the recommended power supplies for these graphics cards depend on what CPU you’re running them with, as these days some CPUs can also require a lot of power supply juice – so whatever combination you have in your PC, you’ll need to keep that in mind.
As reported by @momomo_us on Twitter (via VideoCardz (opens in a new tab)Asus recommends that the RTX 4090 have a power supply of at least 850W if running an Intel Core i5 or Ryzen 5 processor. For those using a Core i7 or Core i9 or Ryzen 7 or 9 chip, this recommendation is increased to 1000W. For Intel HEDT (high-end desktop) or Threadripper processors, the power supply should be 1200W, no less.
For the RTX 4080, the baseline recommendation is 750W and applies to Core i5 and i7 models or Ryzen 5 or 7. For Core i9 or Ryzen 9 it is overclocked to 850W and 1000W for Threadripper or Intel HEDT.
What about these recommendations for the upcoming AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards? Those looking to buy the RX 7900 XT look at the exact same deal as the RTX 4080 – 750W for Core i5 or i7 (and Ryzen 5 or 7) then overclock to 850W for Core i9 or Ryzen 9, and 1000W for HEDT model.
For the RX 7900 XTX, you’re looking for 850W for a Core i5 or i7 (and Ryzen 5 or 7) and 1000W when paired with a Core i9 or Ryzen 9 CPU. For the HEDT chip, the requirement is a high 1200W, similar to the RTX 4090.
Analysis: compare and contrast with the current generation of AMD
It’s interesting to see official data from the graphics card manufacturer for RDNA 3 products, although there are no real surprises here. The RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX in particular were never meant to be less than quite power-hungry for a PC, but AMD’s flagship pushes things to the same level as the RTX 4090 – with the notable exception of an easier time for Core i7 or Ryzen 7 CPU owners (probably quite a lot of users, because not everyone feels the need to switch to Core i9 or Ryzen 9).
Perhaps more informative is comparing AMD’s upcoming graphics cards with their previous models, and here we see that the RX 7900 XT actually performs worse than the 6900 XT. At least for Core i7/Ryzen 7 and Core i9/Ryzen 9 processors, where the 7900 XT requires 100W less and 150W less respectively; that’s pretty impressive by comparison. (In fact, the 7900 XT has the same specs as the 6800 XT, believe it or not.)
There’s no direct comparison to the 7900 XTX, but it performs the same as the 6950 XT (all except turf HEDT, where the new graphics card requires much more, 200W to be exact – but these are more niche cases).
Overall, this is decent news for those looking for a new AMD RDNA 3 GPU in the future, especially given Nvidia’s current issues with melting cables and the RTX 4090 (with question marks as to whether this issue will also affect the RTX 4080) .