Nvidia RTX 5090 Shunt Mod Gets It to 800W, Beating RTX 6000 Pro
Famed overclocker Roman "Der8auer" Hartung has pushed the RTX 5090 to its absolute limits, raising the power limit to close to 800W using a shunt modification. It needed water cooling to prevent serious overheating, but the result is impressive, with the extra performance pushing the 5090 beyond even the capabilities of the professional RTX Pro 6000 , which has more CUDA cores and four times the memory.
The RTX 5090 is, with a few caveats, the fastest graphics card for gaming that anyone has ever seen. But that doesn't mean there isn't a little more juice to wring out of it. Going beyond standard overclocking and power limit adjustments, Der8auer took an already-capable Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 with its large air cooler and 360mm watercooling combination, and soldered on some added resistors to the GPU's PCB, tricking it into unlocking an extra 200W of power.
That extra power goes a long way, with the boost clock rising from 2,800MHz on the core at stock, to just over 3,000MHz with the new power limit. It did pull an average of 748W, and as much as 790W, but the card still didn't break 61 degrees, which is incredible considering this GPU was consuming as much power as a small space heater. Further manual tweaking took the card over 800W in the end, and unlocked enough real-world performance to beat out the RTX Pro 6000.
Credit: der8auer
In 3DMark Speedway, the shunt-modded and overclocked RTX 5090 reached 158fps while pulling 778W. The RTX Pro 6000 is only just behind at 157fps, though it required far less power to do it: "just" 556W. This showcases how inefficient it is to just keep pumping more power into these cards, even if there is additional performance headroom to be found. That's the balancing act that Nvidia has to play when designing them in the first place.
It also shows how much more capable the RTX Pro 6000 is with its additional 2,300 CUDA cores and higher stock boost clock.
The shunt modded card is a bigger upgrade over the stock RTX 5090, though, which for 551W only managed 146fps. The last-generation king, the RTX 4090, managed just 101fps at 408W.
A shunt mod like this is not designed as a daily-driver overclock, but it showcases some intriguing potential of the RTX 50 series to benefit from even more power, even if it destroys the cards' relative efficiency. Now we just need to see what such a mod would do to an RTX Pro 6000.
