Astral (air) 5090 Sub-Par Scores

Coyote_One · May 21, 2025

Alright, strap in, for the story of the sippy cup version of the Astral I have been cursed with.

Build:
9800X3D
Astral 5090 Air
Asus Proart X870E
64GB Gskill 64GB (2x32GB) 6000MT/s CL30-40-40-96
1200w direct dual 12v2x6 power
LF3 AIO 420m
VERY cold room at 68F with PC next to AC unit starting bench idle temps of only 29 degrees C

Steel Nomad scores average around 14900-15100 on a good day.

With the help of some folks on the top of the leaderboards, we tried EVERTYHING within the realm of whats considered "normal". To include the following from the top:

All the usual nvidia/windows max perf/power preferred
Resizable Bar - true
Voltage control afterburner settings - good
x16 5.0 - true
windows game mode/optimized - yes
Core isolation on/off - tried both no effect
Checked AMD PBO
1. Motherboard limit
2. Manual overdrive scalar
3. 5X
4. Positive override +150
5. Auto thermal control
6. Curve optimizer all cores
7. All core curve optimizer mag - negative 20
UCLK was at half, bumped that up to match MCLK

At this point I wasnt getting above 15080.

Font Technology Screenshot Software Video Game Software

We then used the Afterburner overwrite for +3k memory slider and tried to set my own curve. Started at +400 offset and leveled off at 3200 and starting at about 3060 I manually made a nice slow curve up to 3200.

Crashed at desktop upon applying

SO I dropped the curve down to 3100 before flatlining,

then 3000.....

Crashed either at desktop or while running steel nomad

So I began messing around with just lower clock offsets (+250 - 275 - 300 (300 above it crashes always)

At +285, 3000 mem I finally managed to hit a halfway decent score of the day

According to the folks I was working with, my core voltage being 0.95 at times seemed low to them, very very low.....

Temps never get above maybe 62 at the end of the bench run, so temps arent a concern here IMO.

Would love some input from the experts, Im no professional but I feel I understand the basics on how to do this.... And an Astral 5090 shouldnt struggle to get "great" scores :/

Overall 3k mem did seem to help some, which is good. but crashing at +300 doesnt seem right to me

Im not sure I feel like theres a magic button I need to change here but I feel this Astral is just begging for more, but wont give it to me.

Thanks for listening to my failed TED talk!

Carlyle2020 · May 21, 2025

Thanks for all the details.

Shall we first see how good or bad your card is by running it on default values to see how high its clocks on its own?

Then we need another user running the same so we can establish somewhat of a baseline.

If you card clocks far lower that another astral we don´t have to hunt ghosts. And you can sell is sooner than later.

Have you checked with gpu-z if you have all the ROPS?

Some cards miss 8 ...

Coyote_One · May 21, 2025

Carlyle2020 said:
Thanks for all the details.

Shall we first see how good or bad your card is by running it on default values to see how high its clocks on its own?

Then we need another user running the same so we can establish somewhat of a baseline.

If you card clocks far lower that another astral we don´t have to hunt ghosts. And you can sell is sooner than later.

Have you checked with gpu-z if you have all the ROPS?

Some cards miss 8 ...

Yes! All ROP's were the first thing I checked when I booted up, naturally. Ill run a few straight afterburner default clocks and drop in the results in a bit!

Ive been trying to figure that out, apples to apples. I do see a few 3d mark scores a couple hundred pts above me with the same mobo and CPU and an Astral but it doesnt say LC or not.

Ill drop in here later today

Hardware Programmer Video Game Software Electronics

Coyote_One · May 21, 2025

Carlyle2020 said:
Thanks for all the details.

Shall we first see how good or bad your card is by running it on default values to see how high its clocks on its own?

Then we need another user running the same so we can establish somewhat of a baseline.

If you card clocks far lower that another astral we don´t have to hunt ghosts. And you can sell is sooner than later.

Have you checked with gpu-z if you have all the ROPS?

Some cards miss 8 ...

Stock clocks on steel nomad.

Not sure where that falls for other Astrals (air)

Font Screenshot Technology Software Multimedia Software

Coyote_One · May 22, 2025

Small update, after meticulously editing the curves to be as smooth as possible, these are the highest scores Ill get and I am riding right on the edge of crashing

A pixel higher on curves or +1 offset and Ill crash. Still seems like Im hearing people hitting the 600's on Steel Nomad but might be lottery at this point

I scored 40 784 in Port Royal

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 x 1, 65536 MB, 64-bit Windows 11}

www.3dmark.com

I scored 15 469 in Steel Nomad

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 x 1, 65536 MB, 64-bit Windows 11}

www.3dmark.com

blurp · May 22, 2025

I consider Your card is doing fine. Visit official reviews, you'll see your scores are ok. This is not a golden bin. Same for me!

Here is what I get on air too. Fully stable.

Result not found

www.3dmark.com

Also got 15301 but cannot find the official link.

Enjoy your card! Have fun!

bombastinator · May 22, 2025

Those are some hefty parts. This could be a hot case issue. What are your temps like? It looks like you’re forcing them low with software. Those 90° gpu mounts aren’t just to display the pretty side of the card In glass cases. They change which way the fans are pointing. If you’ve got an issue of one part feeding hot air into another part sometimes they can fix it. To really shoot such a problem in the face side vents are often needed as well. Which glass cases can’t (affordably) do. There are ways around it. Acrylic is cheap to drill. People often hate it though.

The Cheap check to see if this is an issue is a piece of paper or two and some scotch tape to use as an air blocker and take the side of the case off. Just removing a side panel may not be enough. You may have to also stop the air from feeding up and down. If you got Manila folders they can work a bit better as they’re made of chip board and are stiffer.

Titan5150 · May 23, 2025

bombastinator said:
Those are some hefty parts. This could be a hot case issue. What are your temps like? It looks like you’re forcing them low with software. Those 90° gpu mounts aren’t just to display the pretty side of the card In glass cases. They change which way the fans are pointing. If you’ve got an issue of one part feeding hot air into another part sometimes they can fix it. To really shoot such a problem in the face side vents are often needed as well. Which glass cases can’t (affordably) do. There are ways around it. Acrylic is cheap to drill. People often hate it though.

The Cheap check is a piece of paper or two and some scotch tape to use as an air blocker and take the side of the case off. Just removing a side panel may not be enough. You may have to also stop the air from feeding up and down. If you got Manila folders they can work a bit better as they’re made of chip board and are stiffer.

I think you missed where he said...

"VERY cold room at 68F with PC next to AC unit starting bench idle temps of only 29 degrees C"

And...

"Temps never get above maybe 62 at the end of the bench run, so temps arent a concern here IMO"

I don't think heat is a problem...

tps3443 · May 23, 2025

Coyote_One said:
Alright, strap in, for the story of the sippy cup version of the Astral I have been cursed with.

Build:
9800X3D
Astral 5090 Air
Asus Proart X870E
64GB Gskill 64GB (2x32GB) 6000MT/s CL30-40-40-96
1200w direct dual 12v2x6 power
LF3 AIO 420m
VERY cold room at 68F with PC next to AC unit starting bench idle temps of only 29 degrees C

Steel Nomad scores average around 14900-15100 on a good day.

With the help of some folks on the top of the leaderboards, we tried EVERTYHING within the realm of whats considered "normal". To include the following from the top:

All the usual nvidia/windows max perf/power preferred

Resizable Bar - true

Voltage control afterburner settings - good

x16 5.0 - true

windows game mode/optimized - yes

Core isolation on/off - tried both no effect

Checked AMD PBO

Motherboard limit

Manual overdrive scalar

5X

Positive override +150

Auto thermal control

Curve optimizer all cores

All core curve optimizer mag - negative 20

UCLK was at half, bumped that up to match MCLK View attachment 2713595

At this point I wasnt getting above 15080.
View attachment 2713596

We then used the Afterburner overwrite for +3k memory slider and tried to set my own curve. Started at +400 offset and leveled off at 3200 and starting at about 3060 I manually made a nice slow curve up to 3200.

Crashed at desktop upon applying

SO I dropped the curve down to 3100 before flatlining,
View attachment 2713603

then 3000.....

View attachment 2713604

Crashed either at desktop or while running steel nomad

So I began messing around with just lower clock offsets (+250 - 275 - 300 (300 above it crashes always)

At +285, 3000 mem I finally managed to hit a halfway decent score of the day
View attachment 2713598

According to the folks I was working with, my core voltage being 0.95 at times seemed low to them, very very low.....

View attachment 2713605

Temps never get above maybe 62 at the end of the bench run, so temps arent a concern here IMO.

Would love some input from the experts, Im no professional but I feel I understand the basics on how to do this.... And an Astral 5090 shouldnt struggle to get "great" scores :/

Overall 3k mem did seem to help some, which is good. but crashing at +300 doesnt seem right to me

Im not sure I feel like theres a magic button I need to change here but I feel this Astral is just begging for more, but wont give it to me.

Thanks for listening to my failed TED talk!

THE REALITY IS: You can have some substantial variation with all 5090’s. The cause is because the voltage is determined by the GPU core, and not the bios. So, you can have two Astral’s. One with 1.125v Astral, and another 1,045v Astral right... And one Astral may consume 50-100 watts more power out of the box than another Astral which uses less power. So your 600 watt TGP gets gobbled up easier, so your effective clock speed gets gobbled up too! Then your Steel Nomad score also gets gobbled up. It is what it is.

THE GOOD NEWS: Nothing is wrong with your card. A shunt mod or XOC bios would quickly unlock the extra performance. Graphics cards have pretty cancerous and locked down firmware by nature. It has been this way for years. Truth is, we can send 1.750v to our CPU’s and burn em down at 115c until it is cooked. But we don’t nearly have the same control over GPU’s.

Higher power consumption 5090’s typically run at reduced effective clocks when it’s nose is buried against the 600w TGP MAX power limit in Steel Nomad. Your 0.950MV load voltage is low because the card naturally steps down in voltage to fit its wide ass inside the power budget, if it didn’t drop voltage it would crash due to being starved of power. It’s like walking through a door way that’s really short. You gotta duck down. Video cards are doing tons of calculations at all times to effectively “Remain Stable depending on the load/temp/available power budget/etc.

I would just use your card and enjoy it. You can shunt mod it and make it rip if you ever wanted to make it fly.

You can follow my video below which may help to find your cards max voltage. And one more thing, I would not let this bother you one bit though.. It’s a great GPU, they run cool, and do the job just fine. Based on your load voltage of only 0.950mv, this makes me think you have a higher power consumption 5090, which it would be right at home with a shunt mod. It just needs a little more power ceiling.

bombastinator · May 23, 2025

Titan5150 said:
I think you missed where he said...

"VERY cold room at 68F with PC next to AC unit starting bench idle temps of only 29 degrees C"

And...

"Temps never get above maybe 62 at the end of the bench run, so temps arent a concern here IMO"

I don't think heat is a problem...

It does sound that way but the software seems to be being used to keep the heat down. 29c is only 84f. Its barely heating at all. It may not even be in the sensitivity range of the sensor. They could possibly be actually the same. If a chiller or overkill water loop is not being used it could be evidence of a problem all by itself. The issue could be the air being warm to begin with and the cpu not being allowed to add much. You could be right but its easy to test. It could also be that while it is not now it is only because there is a problem and if that impediment is removed it becomes one so there is no way to tell IF the original impediment was removed in the first place
The case layout and cooling method matters a lot with this one but its not impossible as the cooling method was not explained.
You are right in that there are some cooling solutions where this could be normal. It is argualble i should have checked what the cooling solution was before advancing the possibility. The only thing we know is that the astral is on air. So the number is really low regardless. If the cpu is on air too and the GPU is not vertical it could be feeding hot air into the cpu fan. If its not on air the cooling is being moved away from the motherboard BUT the cpu and the gpu should have very different numbers.
What I really want to do is rebuild the whole rig on a test bench but thats way too much trouble. I was not aware of the control differences between the 5090 and earlier models in the post following this one, and that may be the correct answer. Post edited to reflect your points.

bombastinator · May 23, 2025

Mispost

donnieyeen · May 26, 2025

Steel Nomad like @tps3443 said is a power limit benchmark, you're hitting the wall hardcore. There is however things you can do in order to try remedy that.

Turn off all RGB it consumes some power
Turn off the FANS from the board and use them externally (FANS consume a lot of power even up to like 30w if all are ran 100%) or turn the fans down to like 60% when test is about to run

Play with curve even lower, 950mV is not that good for Astral, around 935mV was best for me. You should be able to reach around 16k for sure.

Also Astral bios is not that great. Many people use Giga flashed over for benching. Astral is mainly a water card and not that good on air either.

Here's my results with stock air card:

Hiddencontroller · May 26, 2025

Hi, I am having a similar issue as well, and wen through almost the exact same steps as you, down to seeing the crashes once the OC is pushed above 300mhz. I have an aorus master, but these top tier cards shouldn’t be just having “great” scores.

Are you also seeing your card barely reaching 2650mhz? I’m trying to figure out what is different between the 100+ score above us that are seeing 2900mhz…

Hiddencontroller · May 26, 2025

donnieyeen said:
Steel Nomad like @tps3443 said is a power limit benchmark, you're hitting the wall hardcore. There is however things you can do in order to try remedy that.

Turn off all RGB it consumes some power

Turn off the FANS from the board and use them externally (FANS consume a lot of power even up to like 30w if all are ran 100%) or turn the fans down to like 60% when test is about to run

Play with curve even lower, 950mV is not that good for Astral, around 935mV was best for me. You should be able to reach around 16k for sure.

Also Astral bios is not that great. Many people use Giga flashed over for benching. Astral is mainly a water card and not that good on air either.

Here's my results with stock air card:

View attachment 2714346

Hi, I tried fixing exactly as you suggested, and a +285 curve flattened at 1010mv tops out at 2650mhz while the same curve flattened at 950mv tops out at 2500mhz.
How are you getting higher score with a curve flattened at a lower value? I feel like I’m missing something.

donnieyeen · May 27, 2025

Hiddencontroller said:
Hi, I tried fixing exactly as you suggested, and a +285 curve flattened at 1010mv tops out at 2650mhz while the same curve flattened at 950mv tops out at 2500mhz.
How are you getting higher score with a curve flattened at a lower value? I feel like I’m missing something.

Push the points way higher on the curve and lock it a few steps above the range where it runs. Example:

Coyote_One · May 28, 2025

tps3443 said:
THE REALITY IS: You can have some substantial variation with all 5090’s. The cause is because the voltage is determined by the GPU core, and not the bios. So, you can have two Astral’s. One with 1.125v Astral, and another 1,045v Astral right... And one Astral may consume 50-100 watts more power out of the box than another Astral which uses less power. So your 600 watt TGP gets gobbled up easier, so your effective clock speed gets gobbled up too! Then your Steel Nomad score also gets gobbled up. It is what it is.

THE GOOD NEWS: Nothing is wrong with your card. A shunt mod or XOC bios would quickly unlock the extra performance. Graphics cards have pretty cancerous and locked down firmware by nature. It has been this way for years. Truth is, we can send 1.750v to our CPU’s and burn em down at 115c until it is cooked. But we don’t nearly have the same control over GPU’s.

Higher power consumption 5090’s typically run at reduced effective clocks when it’s nose is buried against the 600w TGP MAX power limit in Steel Nomad. Your 0.950MV load voltage is low because the card naturally steps down in voltage to fit its wide ass inside the power budget, if it didn’t drop voltage it would crash due to being starved of power. It’s like walking through a door way that’s really short. You gotta duck down. Video cards are doing tons of calculations at all times to effectively “Remain Stable depending on the load/temp/available power budget/etc.

I would just use your card and enjoy it. You can shunt mod it and make it rip if you ever wanted to make it fly.

You can follow my video below which may help to find your cards max voltage. And one more thing, I would not let this bother you one bit though.. It’s a great GPU, they run cool, and do the job just fine. Based on your load voltage of only 0.950mv, this makes me think you have a higher power consumption 5090, which it would be right at home with a shunt mod. It just needs a little more power ceiling.

Great summary from a seasoned veteran, thank you.

Im nowhere near comfortable enough to solder a shunt mod onto my card, let alone disassemble it.

Im not too familiar with an XOC bios but I hear you cant get a hold of one for a 5090? Some folks said I should just reflash with the astral LC bios on and maybe that would override some of the temp controls.

Ill give your video a watch for sure!

Thanks

andi0139 · Jun 5, 2025

I also have a 5090 TUF non Oc Edition with a very very bad bin. The card boosts stock to around 2767 mhz and goes down to 2730-2715 in Indiana Jones. The Max Oc for this card that is stable with timespy is 3060 mhz which equals +315 on core. But it drops down to 29xx when the power target gets hit in the second graphics test of time spy extreme. When the card is overclocked it reaches a max voltage of 1.0600. I am really really disappointed

Sptz · Jun 5, 2025

tps3443 said:
THE REALITY IS: You can have some substantial variation with all 5090’s. The cause is because the voltage is determined by the GPU core, and not the bios. So, you can have two Astral’s. One with 1.125v Astral, and another 1,045v Astral right... And one Astral may consume 50-100 watts more power out of the box than another Astral which uses less power. So your 600 watt TGP gets gobbled up easier, so your effective clock speed gets gobbled up too! Then your Steel Nomad score also gets gobbled up. It is what it is.

THE GOOD NEWS: Nothing is wrong with your card. A shunt mod or XOC bios would quickly unlock the extra performance. Graphics cards have pretty cancerous and locked down firmware by nature. It has been this way for years. Truth is, we can send 1.750v to our CPU’s and burn em down at 115c until it is cooked. But we don’t nearly have the same control over GPU’s.

Higher power consumption 5090’s typically run at reduced effective clocks when it’s nose is buried against the 600w TGP MAX power limit in Steel Nomad. Your 0.950MV load voltage is low because the card naturally steps down in voltage to fit its wide ass inside the power budget, if it didn’t drop voltage it would crash due to being starved of power. It’s like walking through a door way that’s really short. You gotta duck down. Video cards are doing tons of calculations at all times to effectively “Remain Stable depending on the load/temp/available power budget/etc.

I would just use your card and enjoy it. You can shunt mod it and make it rip if you ever wanted to make it fly.

You can follow my video below which may help to find your cards max voltage. And one more thing, I would not let this bother you one bit though.. It’s a great GPU, they run cool, and do the job just fine. Based on your load voltage of only 0.950mv, this makes me think you have a higher power consumption 5090, which it would be right at home with a shunt mod. It just needs a little more power ceiling.

I just skimmed through that video as I'm at work but that undervolting method looked pretty weird

TiaNastacia · Jun 8, 2025

Carlyle2020 said:
Thanks for all the details.

Shall we first see how good or bad your card is by running it on default values to see how high its clocks on its own?

Then we need another user running the same so we can establish somewhat of a baseline.

If you card clocks far lower that another astral we don´t have to hunt ghosts. And you can sell is sooner than later.

Have you checked with gpu-z if you have all the ROPS?

Some cards miss 8 ...

Late to the party, but since I saw that nobody contributed with the Stock results for comparison, I thought I would share mine.
I LITERALLY just installed this Astral OC on my system. Bought it at Microcenter today.
The results below are using Windows 11 24H2, and NVIDIA Driver 576.28. Stock Astral Performance vBios. Confirmed 176 ROPs.

I scored 15 346 in Steel Nomad

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 x 1, 32768 MB, 64-bit Windows 11}

www.3dmark.com

This result is with +3000MHz memory & +200MHz Core:

I scored 15 785 in Steel Nomad

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 x 1, 32768 MB, 64-bit Windows 11}

www.3dmark.com

Astral (air) 5090 Sub-Par Scores

Coyote_One

Attachments

Carlyle2020

Coyote_One

Coyote_One

Coyote_One

I scored 40 784 in Port Royal

I scored 15 469 in Steel Nomad

blurp

Result not found

bombastinator

Titan5150

tps3443

bombastinator

bombastinator

donnieyeen

Hiddencontroller

Hiddencontroller

donnieyeen

Coyote_One

andi0139

Sptz

TiaNastacia

I scored 15 346 in Steel Nomad

I scored 15 785 in Steel Nomad

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