The Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 has been used to successfully break six overclocking records, divided across four world records and two first place positions in the single GPU environment. Being one of the highest-end variants, all it took was proper cooling for the GPU to blaze past 3.4 GHz with the GDDR7 memory at impressive 35 Gbps speeds, north of what Tony Yu managed to achieve with his ROG Astral RTX 5090D.
These latest RTX 5090 overclocking endeavors were spearheaded by Safedisk, Asus' in-house extreme overclocker from South Korea. A handful of test setups were used for these benchmarks, with systems featuring CPUs including the i9-14900KF, the Ryzen 9 9950X, and even a 96-core Threadripper PRO 7995WX. In certain scenarios, the GPU was air-cooled; in others, it was liquid-cooled.
The ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC is rated at a boost clock of 2.58 GHz out of the box. This number is quite conservative for Nvidia GPUs. Even the dual-slot RTX 5090 FE with a 2.4 GHz boost clock, readily hovered between 2.65 GHz and 2.8 GHz across a geometric mean of 22 games in our testing. Of course, the Astral is noticeably bulkier, wielding a quad-slot design and phase-change thermal pads for improved temperatures and greater overclocking headroom.
Safedisk handily broke four world records in Port Royal, Fire Strike Extreme, and Unigine Superposition at 1080p and 8K resolutions. With varying setups, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 maintained steady clocks at 3 GHz with air cooling. In Time Spy Extreme and GPUPI, where results are limited to single-GPU setups to prevent the advantages of multiple GPUs, the ROG Astral RTX 5090 stands as the fastest. Mounted with a liquid cooling pot, overclocking this GPU pushed it past 3.45 GHz with the memory speeds coming in at an impressive 35 Gbps (17.5 GHz).
Beyond overclocking, Asus also highlighted the advantages of its connector design. Recently, it came to light that RTX 50 and RTX 40 GPUs based on Nvidia's reference design cannot tell if one of the pins is drawing excessive current. If the cable isn't inserted properly or if there's an internal break, all the current may flow through a single pin, causing it to melt and there's no way to know until after the fact.
Asus' design for the ROG Astral RTX 5090 and ROG Matrix RTX 4090 includes an additional group of shunt resistors, allowing per-pin current detection through software. This can help detect anomalies in power distribution, and notify the user if the cable needs to be reseated. In fact, a Chinese user has been working on something similar and plans to make their design open-source in the future.
