Some absolute madlad leaked a 2,002-watt extreme overclocking BIOS that was supposed to stay locked down for the Chinese ASUS GeForce Astral RTX 5090 D variant, and people are already flashing it onto their regular cards for benchmark bragging rights. One guy slapped it onto his GIGABYTE RTX 5090 and managed to hit over 18,000 points in Steel Nomad, which puts him near the top 25 worldwide, even though his card was only sucking down around 900 watts instead of the full two kilowatts.
The whole thing is pretty stupid when you think about it, since regular 600-watt RTX 5090 cards already have melting connector problems, and pushing an extra 400 watts through your system for maybe 10 to 20 extra frames makes zero sense. Water cooling your cables might help prevent your rig from turning into a bonfire, but most cards will struggle even with the 800-watt ASUS Matrix BIOS that people were using before this leak.
The whole thing is pretty stupid when you think about it, since regular 600-watt RTX 5090 cards already have melting connector problems, and pushing an extra 400 watts through your system for maybe 10 to 20 extra frames makes zero sense. Water cooling your cables might help prevent your rig from turning into a bonfire, but most cards will struggle even with the 800-watt ASUS Matrix BIOS that people were using before this leak.
