A General Overview of PCIe 5.0 Power Supplies, Details Thanks To MSI

Meet The New PSU Standard In Three Of MSI’s New Line

It’s time for PCIe 5.0 power supplies to be on your mind, even if you aren’t planning on spending close to $1000 on a new NVIDIA GPU.  This will be the new standard going forwards and thanks to The FPS Review talking with MSI you can get a grounding in what the new terms mean.  This overview covers the MSI MPG A1000G, A850G, and A750G PCIe 5.0 power supplies specifically, but the new standards will apply to all new PSUs.

The two main things to remember are to look for ATX 3.0 PSUs and that it can support PCIE5 12VHPWR.   The first thing to know is that ATX 3.0 has rebranded power spikes as ‘power excursions’, and has been designed to handle them much better.  Thanks to a new design and a few extra capacitors, PCIe 5.0 power supplies should be able to power new GPUs at a lower wattage than ATX 2.x PSUs.  The current design of PSU needs to be able to supply around triple the maximum wattage of your GPU to handle power spikes, whereas the new ATX 3.0 should only need twice the wattage; leave some extra power for the rest of your system when shopping though!

The new PSUs will come with a PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector, a 12-pin power cable with 4 data sense pins for sideband signaling for a total of 16-pins.  This means there will be no GPUs which sport three eight pin PCIe connectors.  However, be warned there will be different flavours of 12VHPWR cords!   The specification allows for a 150W cable option, a 300W cable option, a 450W cable option, and even a 600W cable option, so make sure you know your GPUs power requirements before pairing it with your new PCIe 5.0 power supply.

As for the PCIe 5.0 rating on a PSU?  Well, that is because PCIe 5.0 is not just a bus, it is also a standard which describes how power spikes are dealt with, as well as the overall limits.  You can learn more about PCIe 5.0 power supplies in general, and MSI’s offerings in detail in their recent article.