Idle power usage ? Is this reasonable ? (MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G)

[pe129b02a4]

Hi,
I recently added an MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G VENTUS 2X OC PLUS alongside an ASUS PRIME GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB in a soon-to-be-cased AI/NAS combo system.

When both GPUs are installed, I’m seeing a consistent difference in idle power draw and temperature between the two cards.

At total idle (no monitors connected to either GPU, system display handled by the AMD iGPU), the ASUS card reports ~2 W and ~41 °C, while the MSI card reports ~9 W and ~51 °C. Both GPUs remain in P8, with zero utilization and no running processes. Under load, power usage behaves as expected on both cards.

What’s also notable is that the MSI card runs ~10 °C hotter at idle despite being the outer card with completely unobstructed airflow.

Fri Jan 23 00:44:12 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 591.74                 Driver Version: 591.74         CUDA Version: 13.1     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                  Driver-Model | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti   WDDM  |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   41C    P8              2W /  180W |       0MiB /  16311MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
|   1  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti   WDDM  |   00000000:03:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   51C    P8              9W /  180W |       0MiB /  16311MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

This testing is currently being done under Windows 11 (WDDM) as a validation step; the OS will be replaced once the system is fully assembled.

System configuration (for reference):

• Case: Jonsbo N5
• Motherboard: ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900 (provides sufficient PCIe lanes for both GPUs at full bandwidth)
• Memory: 128 GB DDR5 (2×64 GB)
• GPUs:
  • ASUS PRIME GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (inner slot, nearest CPU)
  • MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G VENTUS 2X OC PLUS (outer GPU slot)
• Storage: NVMe Gen4 (1 TB + 2 TB Kingston NV3)
• Additional PCIe device: LSI Avago 9400-16i SAS HBA (PCIe 4.0 slot at the edge of the board)
• PSU: Corsair RM1000x (2021 model)

Has anyone observed similar idle power draw and temperature behavior with this MSI model (or comparable MSI cards), especially in multi-GPU systems?
Is this expected due to VBIOS, board design, or power-management differences, or something worth further investigation?

Thanks,
/PeO

 

[Svet]

Is this expected due to VBIOS, board design, or power-management differences

Yes.

What’s also notable is that the MSI card runs ~10 °C hotter at idle despite being the outer card with completely unobstructed airflow.

You can't really compare a complete different GPUs.
2 FANs vs 3FANs and completely different design.

Even if you compare exactly the same GPU models,
there will be still some difference.

Another thing:
The GPU's PCIe slot location also affect those reading.
You can try to reverse their places you should probably see some changes from what's currently shown.

or something worth further investigation?

Nope.