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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
