The BIOS version (RTX 5090 ROG Astral XOC) allows you to supply 1600 watts to the video card

Unprepared for the experiments, Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 AORUS Master was able to operate with a power consumption limit extended to 1600 watts. All thanks to the extreme BIOS version.

This risk was taken by the famous YouTube channel JayzTwoCents. They got their hands on a modified XOC (Extreme OverClocking) BIOS from NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 ROG Astral graphics cards which the team flashed into the card from Gigabyte. It is important to note that this version of the BIOS differs from the one for NVIDIA RTX 5090D (with a 2000W limit). The ROG Astral XOC BIOS is designed for full-fledged NVIDIA RTX 5090 cards and allows the card to consume no more than 1600 watts.

The BIOS replacement process itself turned out to be simple and went with minimal risk of damaging the card at the software level — thanks to the support of Dual BIOS technology in Gigabyte RTX 5090 AORUS Master. However, the risk of damage at the hardware level was quite high, as the modified BIOS does not take into account the maximum possible load on the video card’s power connectors.

After replacing the basic Gigabyte BIOS with the ROG Astral XOC, the video card started up with one broken fan. The reason was that the ASUS card controller is designed to work with 4 fans, while Gigabyte has only 3.

After flashing, the video author significantly increased the GPU and VRAM frequencies, and set the power limit to 900 watts. In this mode, the card delivered 10% higher performance than in stock mode and 4% — with the standard power limit (at the same frequencies). The author of the video also noted that simply increasing the TGP limit had almost no effect on the overall performance of the card.

As you can see from the experiment, the performance gain from replacing the BIOS was not that great. It can be almost completely compensated for by normal overclocking with the standard consumption limit.

Source: Videocardz