PNY 5090 OC PC Shutting Off At 100% Power Limit (My Fix)

I just bought the PNY 5090 OC as a birthday present to replace my MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO. Everything was running great on my 4090 for about a year that I've had it. Install of the 5090 was easy. Just take out the 4090 and put in the 5090. My PSU is a be quiet! 1600W 80 plus Ti, and it comes with a 12VHPWR connector. Everything went fine until I started playing games. Every game I would play would immediately shut off upon launch or upon entering a game, causing my PC to restart. Upon inspection of the event viewer, every crash preceded with an "ACPI thermal zone \_ TZ.TZ00 has been enumerated" Kernal-Power event.

I tried running Gen 4 PCIE, DDU reinstall of drivers, changing in-game settings, updating BIOS to the August 2025 version, and some other recommendations I've seen online for the 5090. Eventually, I try lowering the power limit in MSI AB to 90%, and poof, no more hard resetting. After gaming for a couple of hours, I do eventually get a hard reset in Elite: Dangerous, which is by no means a very heavy GPU intensive game compared to others. I lower to 85% and the issues go away for the remainder of the night.

Upon further research, I notice that in MSI AB, my GPU is pulling around 580W to 600W depending on 85% or 90% power limit. This seemed really high, so I double checked the TDP of the 5090, and the reference has one of 575W while the PNY OC among other AIB OC cards have a TDP of 600W. Even so, I think it's concerning that my card is drawing that much power AT A REDUCED POWER LIMIT. Even at the 85% power limit, I am still gaining about 100 FPS in 4k titles, so no big deal right? Well, like many of the PC enthusiast community, I suffer from raging 'tism. And so to stroke my 'tism, I spent the afternoon today doing further troubleshooting.

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FIX:

I can't remember the exact thread or website I saw the post, but someone recommended turning on the single-rail OC on my PSU to fix the issue. Ugh, I don't want to take my PSU shroud off and rummage through the bird's nest of cables underneath, but what the heck, I NEED 100% POWER. So flashforward to me writing this post. I plug in my PSU OC jumper, and while I'm doing that, I notice that my 12VHPWR connector is plugged into the 12V5 connector on the PSU. The one below that is a 12V6 connector. In addition to the OC jumper, I switch the 12VHPWR connector to the 12V6 outlet. And voilà, running at 100% power limit!

After a quick test in Overwatch 2, I was able to log into a custom match, where previously it would power off the PC immediately in the hero select menu. This time, no crashing in hero select. I run around the map on Lucio and speed boost around to put some strain on the GPU and check my MSI AB metrics afterwards. After wallriding around for a couple of minutes, I don't suffer any crashes. MSI AB's monitor states I pulled 590-608W while in-game. THAT'S A LOT OF POWER, but no crashes.

I am not sure if the single-rail PSU OC or the 12V6 outlet is the final culprit, but both of those changes have guaranteed stability (for now) on the current 581.15 driver. I will still be running at 90% power limit since I am not comfortable running over 600W constantly. One, that's pushing the limit of the card, and two, that's an expensive bill to pay as a daily gamer.

And by the way, in 4k applications, I have seen a boost of 50-100% fps gains. I highly recommend for 4K enthusiasts to pick one up as they drop down closer to MSRP because it is a noticeable increase in performance. Since my monitor is also 240 Hz, it is able to take full advantage of the performance uplift.

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SPECS:

Motherboard: MSI Z790 GODLIKE MAX

CPU: Intel 14900KS

GPU: PNY 5090 OC

RAM: Corsair Dominator 96GB 6400MT

PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W

Monitor: Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 4K 240Hz 32"