ATX 3.0 power supplies have started to become common ground as more companies unveil their products for modern-day GPUs. One valid reason to invest in an ATX 3.0 PSU is the power spikes affecting modern-day GPUs.
Power Spikes & Excursions Are Just A Few Reasons To Why You Should Get An ATX 3.0 Power Supply
The ATX 3.0 standard was designed for several reasons, power excursions and power spikes are just a few of those but they are very much an occurrence on modern-day GPUs, even if sometimes rare. Now we have to say that modern-day GPUs are also some of the most efficient cards to date despite their higher power consumption thanks to architectural changes and relying on advanced techniques.
We were provided some tests of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti by MSI which was running on their brand-new MPG A850G PCIe power supply. This PSU is ATX 3.0 compliant & we have tested out its bigger 1000W brother which is an absolutely fantastic unit if you are building a high-end PC there are also variants that come with the Gen5 connector. MSI has a lot of options for users which you can check out here.
So back to the RTX 4070 Ti, in our own tests, we saw the particular graphics card to be extremely efficient and offer gaming performance that is slightly faster than the RTX 3090 Ti at less than 1/2 the power draw. But even an efficient card such as the RTX 4070 Ti can sometimes face those rare power spikes and excursions that we just mentioned above. Following is the raw data provided by MSI which gives us a look at the peak power that the card can hit when running Cyberpunk 2077 in both stock and overclocked conditions:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti power in gaming:
Cyberpunk 2077RTX 4070 Ti (Stock)RTX 4070 Ti (OC)3DMark (Full System)Unigine Heaven
Max Power Consumption (W)885.3965.510181113.2
12V1 (Current A)3.723.723.723.76
12V2 (Current A)2020.232.834.8
12V3 (GPU) (Current A)41.64840.446.4
5V (Current A)18.418.617.817.6
3.3V (Current A)2.882.881.81.72
You can see above that the max power spikes can hit almost 1000W, that’s 3.5x higher than the reference TGP of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card. In 3DMark, you can even exceed the 1000W rating which a regular ATX 2.0 PSU rated at 750/850W wouldn’t have handled as well since their OPP or Over-Power-Protection is rated at around 120-130% above the normal usage & in these examples, we can see the power draw exceeding that limit.
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One should remember that power spikes are an occurrence on all modern-day GPUs. While the RTX 4070 Ti was used as an example, all NVIDIA RTX 30/40 & AMD Radeon RX 6000/7000 can yield such spikes. Some users also experience these spikes during gaming such as this Reddit user who encountered an 800W spike on an RTX 4090 while playing Days Gone.
OPP ATX 2.0 PSU
OCP TrippedOPP TrippedCyberpunk 2077 PeakHeavy CPU+GPU load – Peak
ATX 2.0 PSU 750W12V / 79A (125%)958W (125%)GPU OC: 965.5W
Non-OC: 885.3WGPU OC: 1113.2W
Non-OC: 1018W
ATX 2.0 PSU 850W12V / 88A (125%)1054W (125%)GPU OC: 965.5W
Non-OC: 885.3WGPU OC: 1113.2W
Non-OC: 1018W
I should also mention some good Platinum and Titanium ATX 2.0 PSUs are still all you’d need to power the highest-end hardware available today, even Gold-rated ATX 2.0 PSUs would do the trick but just to be future-proof, I would advise new builders or those upgrading their PCs to invest in an ATX 3.0 PSU. They cost almost the same as the ATX 2.0 units plus the Gen5 connectors, although prone to user error, is a lot less hassle to manage than the adapters that NVIDIA & their partners ship with their cards. Or you can just get a 3rd party Gen5 connector (right-angled ones) from one of your favorite cable manufacturers such as CableMod.
The post Power Spikes on Modern GPUs Are A Good Excuse To Invest In An ATX 3.0 Power Supply by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.
