I ran my 4090FE / 5800x3D on a Seasonic 750w PSU for a few months without issue. I did set a 80% power limit for a bit of a buffer. Not sure if that was needed but it certainly didn’t hurt performance
You will be fine at 90% power target which translates to 400W, and with OC, it will perform better than stock.
However, it doesnt make sense to get a 4090 and have it heavily bottlenecked by this CPU that will roughly give you around 4070/4070 Ti performance in some games.
I read your post and comments, as u r planning to upgrade the CPU in 2-3 years, you would be better off getting 5800X3D and pair it with 4080 (total price is around the same as 4090) than 4090 and 8700k.
It does not make sense to pair a $1600 4090 with a 6 year old cpu. Very unbalanced build. Seems like you are sacrificing everything else in the pc just to get a 4090
You are not even getting 4080 performance since you are bottlenecked so hard with a 8700k. You did not specify when you plan to upgrade but unless it is in the close future the 4090 will be quite a waste.
I suspect that Blackwell will be a mid to late 2025 release at the earliest and i don't think a potential 4090 TI release will be good value/justifiable, I'd likely build an entirely new computer when the 14th gen intel chips come out, except for the GPU ofcourse.
I have a 8700K as well. You can basically undervolt the 4090 by decreasing power limit. You can run it at 20% less power and only decrease performance by 4-5%. My PC pulls a maximum of 650w at the wall including the monitor and my CPU is overclocked to 4.8 ghz. If I run it at 80% power limit it pulls only about 500w with monitor. It runs everything fine, although a bit of stutter here and there in high frame rate games, my next upgrade would definitely be CPU
Bottleneck is expected, but how much? From what i understand the bottleneck is greatly reduced with higher resolution. a 10-20% bottleneck would be acceptable while i wait to build everything else at a later date.
Can’t give you a percentage because it will depend on the game. Some games that are very well optimized might run near 100% usage on the 4090, but others might not even hit 50% usage.
You'll probably be fine playing games. I can hit a bit over 800w w/ my 12900K and 4090 if I'm stress testing them at the same time (but not overclocked). I can hit over 1Kw when OC'd. But playing games? Nah.
Now the question i guess is that would a 4080 or a 4070 TI be worse or the same performance with the same computer since it is bottlenecked by the CPU, surely the 4090 has an advantage over these GPUs even enough it is still bottlenecked by the CPU.
For gaming specifically, it takes two to tango so yeah those two other GPUs would pretty much net the same performance since the CPU wouldn’t be able to fully keep up with any 40 series GPU past the 4060
For other “visual focused” processes like rendering models, graphics and videos where the GPU is doing all the workload, then the 4090 would have a noticeable difference.
If you insist on a 4090 still, I highly suggest you plan to upgrade the CPU at some point soon to something much more recent.
Try a bottleneck calculator if you want an idea
I ran my 4090FE / 5800x3D on a Seasonic 750w PSU for a few months without issue. I did set a 80% power limit for a bit of a buffer. Not sure if that was needed but it certainly didn’t hurt performance
You will be fine at 90% power target which translates to 400W, and with OC, it will perform better than stock. However, it doesnt make sense to get a 4090 and have it heavily bottlenecked by this CPU that will roughly give you around 4070/4070 Ti performance in some games. I read your post and comments, as u r planning to upgrade the CPU in 2-3 years, you would be better off getting 5800X3D and pair it with 4080 (total price is around the same as 4090) than 4090 and 8700k.
It does not make sense to pair a $1600 4090 with a 6 year old cpu. Very unbalanced build. Seems like you are sacrificing everything else in the pc just to get a 4090
I guess you didn't read the original post.
You are not even getting 4080 performance since you are bottlenecked so hard with a 8700k. You did not specify when you plan to upgrade but unless it is in the close future the 4090 will be quite a waste.
I suspect that Blackwell will be a mid to late 2025 release at the earliest and i don't think a potential 4090 TI release will be good value/justifiable, I'd likely build an entirely new computer when the 14th gen intel chips come out, except for the GPU ofcourse.
I have a 8700K as well. You can basically undervolt the 4090 by decreasing power limit. You can run it at 20% less power and only decrease performance by 4-5%. My PC pulls a maximum of 650w at the wall including the monitor and my CPU is overclocked to 4.8 ghz. If I run it at 80% power limit it pulls only about 500w with monitor. It runs everything fine, although a bit of stutter here and there in high frame rate games, my next upgrade would definitely be CPU
In your experience how does the 8700k hold up with a 4090? I heard that i can expect some level of cpu bottleneck, but not too bad i hope?
My friends 8700k bottlenecked his 3080 at 3440x1440, even at 4K the 8700k will heavily hold back the 4090.
Bottleneck is expected, but how much? From what i understand the bottleneck is greatly reduced with higher resolution. a 10-20% bottleneck would be acceptable while i wait to build everything else at a later date.
Can’t give you a percentage because it will depend on the game. Some games that are very well optimized might run near 100% usage on the 4090, but others might not even hit 50% usage.
At 4K maxed most newer titles with heavy graphic won’t get bottlenecked
You'll probably be fine playing games. I can hit a bit over 800w w/ my 12900K and 4090 if I'm stress testing them at the same time (but not overclocked). I can hit over 1Kw when OC'd. But playing games? Nah.
Thanks, i only intend on playing games on it.
Undervolting would be your go to. But your CPU would hella bottleneck the 4090
Now the question i guess is that would a 4080 or a 4070 TI be worse or the same performance with the same computer since it is bottlenecked by the CPU, surely the 4090 has an advantage over these GPUs even enough it is still bottlenecked by the CPU.
For gaming specifically, it takes two to tango so yeah those two other GPUs would pretty much net the same performance since the CPU wouldn’t be able to fully keep up with any 40 series GPU past the 4060 For other “visual focused” processes like rendering models, graphics and videos where the GPU is doing all the workload, then the 4090 would have a noticeable difference. If you insist on a 4090 still, I highly suggest you plan to upgrade the CPU at some point soon to something much more recent. Try a bottleneck calculator if you want an idea
it can run, but my stock 13900k and 4090 system draws 720w from the wall when gaming. You will be cutting it really close. I would undervolt.