We’ve talked a lot about PCIe Gen5 power supplies. Indeed, the new connection 12VHPWR allows a single cable to pass up to 600W of continuous power. We have already tested one of these power supplies with the GIGABYTE UD1000GM PCIe 5.0† Like the current RTX 3090 Ti, upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000/5000 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 cards will use this connector. But what do we learn from this? Stephen Estonianthe power specialist at Intel, is that next-gen graphics cards sometimes spike from 1350 watts †for the 3090 Ti given at 450W) for 100 ms. Therefore, with an RTX 4090 e.g. at 600W, lpeak consumption can be up to 1800 Watts† Specifically, it should be taken into account that the TGP of the card can be tripled for a short time.
ATX 3.0 power supplies: more important than you initially think
To deal with this correctly, you must of course pass on the new ATX 3.0 standard† As we have already explained, current power supplies are very old in design. We are going through a major evolution. ATX 3.0 allows the PSU to deliver such power spikes while still supplying power to the rest of the PC components like CPU, RAM, SSDs, etc. This is so that the PC does not crash due to lack of power on the power supply. This new generation of blocks therefore uses more powerful and larger capacitors. Likewise, it is also for this reason that high wattage blocks are recommended for future graphics cards so that they can withstand such consumption without flinching for the short amount of time it takes.
As we saw during our test, the new cable for the PCIe Gen5 has four signal wires. These provide communication between the power supply and the graphics card, so that it knows what power is available.
A board manufacturer now knows that they are allowed to push 200% of the maximum power of the power supplies for 100 microseconds or 120% of the maximum power of the PSU for 100 milliseconds.
Also note that if according to Intel you have a GPU that consumes 300 Watts, a CPU of 300W and you have 150 Watts for the rest of the configuration, a well-designed ATX 3.0 750W power supply will suffice. On the other hand, with a block in ATX 2.X, a block with a power of 1100 watts would be needed for the block to handle the peaks in GPU consumption. As you will understand, the ATX 3.0 power supply is a major development that should not be overlooked.
