Should I upgrade my PSU for RTX 4000?

It's an important thing to consider - so read on...

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The new RTX 40 series is dropping and to back up the need for power Intel has come with a new ATX standard. ATX 3.0 is the new design standard for PSU to support and feed the new Graphics cards era.

And if you are going to buy an RTX 40 series then yes, you probably will have to upgrade your PSU.

Winds of change are coming towards us and with change, comes expenses: beautiful, high, and lovely expenses – if you can afford them. The New Nvidia RTX 40 series will drop on October 12 to prove that everything we’ve been playing with so far is trash.

This new GPU series will deliver a 2.52 GHz clock speed, boast 16384 CUDA cores, support for the new 3rd generation ray tracing cores, 4th generation Tensor core, and, above all that, it will have over 76 billion transistors.

That alone means power needs: you’ll likely be converting your PC into a power-hungry machine with a power spike of around 1500W. So yes, you’ll need a PSU to handle that hunger.

What power supply do I need for RTX 4000 Series?

The new RTX 4000 series will provide a vast increase in power efficiency and performance. This increase will require more power from the PSU.

If you are upgrading your graphics card for a brand new RTX 4000 series you will need to have a reliable ATX 3.0 PSU to handle the power excursions and overall needs of the new GPU.

Nvidia itself has suggested a PSU of at least 850W for the RTX 4090 (750W for the 16GB RTX 4008). Ideally, any new PSU would fit those numbers and the ATX 3.0 spec, so there is efficient communication between PSU and GPU about power draw.

Why care about power excursions?

Intel and the PCI-SIG finally addressed one of the most common situations with GPUs; power spikes. These are sudden spikes of power when the GPU demands more power from the PSU.

They call these spikes “power excursions”, and this is the first time they officially recognized and outlined the capability of a GPU to exceed the sustained power of the card by 3x.

So a 600-watt card on a PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector is allowed to spike to 1,800 watts, and they do, although just for about 100 microseconds.

In conclusion, if you want to avoid a $1,500 investment going into the trash can, you‘ll want to upgrade your PSU before getting the new RTX 4000 series.