Title pretty much tells you all you need to know about my situation. In a turn of events tonight I’ve been gifted a used but working EVGA 3090 card to replace my seven year old 1070.
My current system hardware specs are:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core (upgraded from Ryzen 5 last year)
GPU: MSI 1070
MoBo: MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK
PSU - Corsair CX-550 550 Watt
x4 8GB Installed Memory
I also have a 2tb SSD drive with my OS and games installed, and 4 8tb HDD for media.
My main concern is with needing to replace my MoBo with a x3 PCi board and worries about my PSU not being powerful enough. I’m not particularly worried about my tower is a Phanteks Enthoo Pro PH-ES614PC_BK.
Thanks in advance!
don’t need to touch anything except the psu. the rest of your rig will keep up fine. that phanteks has official support for up to 340mm long cards without the hard drive cages (you will likely need to remove those), and the EVGA FTW3 3090’s were 300mm cards on the dot.
absolutely the fucking do not try to run a hungry 3090 off a 550W CX supply. the infamous 30-series transients will trip that poor thing constantly. buy a 750w or ideally a 850-1000w fully modular unit from SeaSonic, Corsair, or EVGA.
My 850w seasonic X powersupply tripped on a 3080ti. I got a 1000w Seasonic and that seemed to fix it.
I use a 10 year old 750w Seasonic to run a 3090, kinda crazy an 850w tripped. What CPU?
5800x OCed
yeah the 30 series power management was not great. i doubt that was ever the PSU’s fault- if anything seasonic’s more sensitive OCP would have exacerbated the problem lol
Yeah, was annoying, but the PSU was already halfway through it’s useful life while chips have been ballooning in power requirements. I gave it to a friend and hope to keep this PSU longer. Though I plan on keeping my current hardware for a number of years as improvements have been pretty iterative. :p
yeah the PSU market has sure changed. 1000W used to be insane, now it’s just normal for high end builds lol.
if you’re running a 3080ti you’re definitely good on hardware at least for another 3-4 years. I managed to stretch my old 970 almost 6 years, I can’t imagine current top-end hardware will age any worse than that.
Motherboard is fine.
Corsair AXi 850w PSU is what you need.
Assuming you have the right power connectors, don’t exceed the max draw from the PSU, and that the card will fit, you can use a newer graphics card in the older PCIE slot. You’ll take a performance hit for doing so. The major difference in slots is the bandwidth. You end up not being able to push enough data to the card to fully utilize it.
The PCIe standard is both backward and forward compatible between generations.
https://www.electronicshub.org/can-you-use-a-pcie-3-0-card-in-a-2-0-slot/
The MAG B550 looks like it has PCI gen 4, so you would be good to run the card.
The power supply probably needs to be replaced though.
Seconded. Everything looks compatible except the PSU.
Gpus are backwards compatible. You won’t get the full speed with an old motherboard but it won’t be worse than the old card.
The PSU is a valid concern. You probably want to upgrade to a 700w. As long as it is at least gold rates you will be fine with almost any brand.
The CPU itself is still powerful, so from my perspective there is no need to go all out on a new system, just a new PSU. If you don’t hit 60 in your favorite games at your preferred resolution with your preferred graphics level, only then should you consider upgrading.
If you can go more than 700w you should (especially for a 3090, I’d be looking at a 800w at least but would probably go for 1000w myself), you wont use more power than the system needs anyway, so there’s no harm having the extra headroom for the future.
Everything looks more than good except that PSU as others mentioned. 750 should be okay, I’d try to get 850 or 1000 if you can afford the extra amount.
The 3000 series is known for transient spikes that can trip OCP on power supplies that can deliver the needed wattage. Obviously don’t cheap out on a no-name or low quality unit. 5900X is more than enough today, and you’ve got plenty of RAM. Motherboard I wouldn’t consider a concern either, put that money into the PSU instead.
The motherboard is fine, unless you want some of the overclocking features there’s really no need to go above the b550 chipset for a Ryzen 5xxxx series.
That CPU will be excellent paired with a 3090.
You will need more RAM. At least 16GB in a dual channel kit, though 32GB would be better. Going beyond that would be kind of pointless at this point.
The PSU you would definitely need to upgrade. You’d need a minimum of 750W, but going with a 1000W PSU would give you some headroom for future upgrades for a pretty minimal price increase.
Glad to see that the MoBo and CPU should pair without fault for the 3090. Truthfully I haven’t refreshed myself on hardware jargon since I built my PC around 2018.
you will need more RAM
That was a complete typo on my part, I meant to put x4 8GB for 32GB total.
PSU was expected, upgrading to a GPU that maxes 350W on its own. Will probably be looking into a 1000W unit on your recommendation, just for future proofing
As an additional note, if you’re comfortable doing so, I’d recommend going into the BIOS and undervolting the CPU down to 1.2 or 1.3 volts.
A common issue with the higher end Ryzen 5xxx CPUs is that they run a bit hot which prevents them from boosting clock speeds as high for as long as they’re able.
My last build very similar to yours, (3090, 5900x, 32GB RAM) and I was able to shave almost 10C off of the CPU temps by setting a CPU voltage offset of -0.15 volts.
A B550 motherboard should have PCIE 4.0, which means your GPU upgrade is just drop-in. You should be good to go.
You might be able to get by with the power supply but 750+ watts is recommended for a 3090. Any B550 motherboard should be totally fine.
For what it’s worth I’m running a 5950X, 3090, a pair of water pumps, and 11 fans all off a 750 watt Corsair PSU and I’ve never experienced any instability or signs of an insufficient PSU.
If it were me in your situation, I’d just pick up a decent 750-800 watt PSU, and upgrade the memory to a decent 32 gig memory kit while I’m at it just to have a little better time. 3600mhz with decent timings seems to be the sweet spot. Otherwise, as long as the GPU fits the case, you should be in great shape to run it.
I think OP means is that he has 4 8GB sticks for already a total of 32GB. While not quite as good as two 16GB sticks, it wouldn’t be worth the upgrade cost IMO. I’d say he just needs to upgrade the PSU and maybe replace the thermal pads/paste on his new used 3090 if he’s done that sort of thing before.
Hard agree on investing on a more powerful psu, you always want headroom on wattage (and a good rating as well)
Sorry for off topic, but I just had a little panic.
1070
seven year old
Am I old?
Haha you should’ve seen the look of pity my brother in law gave me when I told him my PC’s specs. I thought a 10-series was still a respectable card to have.! Oh well, I got a hand me down 3090 out of it, so can’t complain
10 series still hold up fairly well for a ton of things, and the 1080ti is good enough to still be relevant for even new games with fancy graphics.
