If you’ve ever thought that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 was cool and all, but that its 600W of peak power consumption still wasn’t quite enough to effectively heat your whole house, have we got the mod for you. Thanks to the addition of a second 12VHPWR connector on this Gigabyte RTX 5090 card, one modder has made the upgrade we’ve all been asking for and pushed an RTX 5090 to hit a peak power consumption of 1,521W.
As a quick browse for space heaters on Amazon shows, pushing over 1500W through the best gaming GPU in the world really does put it on par with dedicated heating units and right at the limit of what a standard household circuit can deliver using a 120V outlet.
To achieve this ridiculous power push, a user named sugi0lover, on the overclock.net forums, took their water-cooled Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce and, having noted that its PCB appeared to have a space for a second power connector, simply soldered a second 12VHPWR connector to the card. Hooking the two connectors up and adding in-cable power meters to them, sugi0lover was able to push the card to its limits with 936W shown running through one cable, while the other is pushing 585W.
For context, a normal RTX 5090 has a nominal peak power usage of 600W, which it gets via its notoriously fire-prone 12VHPWR cable. So, not only has sugi0lover doubled this power limit by adding a second cable, but one of those cables is also pushing way past its intended capacity.
As an overclocking enthusiast, sugi0lover’s goal here seemingly isn’t to game continuously with the card running at these extremes, but to register a world record with the card. However, it’s possible that the card might be able to cope with sustained loads at close to this power consumption level – it will be fascinating to see if sugi0lover posts any further benchmarks or game footage with this setup.
RTX 5090 cards with twin power connectors aren’t unheard of, with MSI just recently announcing and even giving away a new RTX 5090 Lightning Z card that has a built in AIO water cooler and requires two 12VHPWR connectors. However, this is the first time we’ve seen one of these cards pushed to such high power consumption.
