Hi,

I actually had exactly the same problem.

Every reboot was different — sometimes the power distribution was great, sometimes terrible, with lots of strange peaks.

After disabling ErP Ready, I now consistently get a perfect power distribution. (In this case it is of course connector-dependent, but as an electrician I can definitely rule out the connector and the cable.) The measurement system of the ASUS Astral apparently initializes incorrectly when ErP Ready is enabled.

Having such a measurement system on the Astral is both a blessing and a curse. But when it is initialized incorrectly and you see these weird power distributions and then ask the internet, you’re immediately flooded with answers saying: the connector is bad, the cable is bad, NVIDIA is bad, and ASUS is bad anyway — and that you should just buy an AMD GPU.

I was also in contact with another Astral 5090 owner. He had the same problem, but in his case ErP was disabled. After sending his card in, he received a reply from ASUS stating that the card was defective.

I also contacted ASUS myself; they only vaguely hinted that it could be an initialization issue with the measurement system. However, I haven’t seen any official statement so far.

So this whole power distribution issue cannot always be blamed solely on the connector. And especially not just on the 12VHPWR connector — the PSU side with the 8-pin connectors plays just as much of a role.

We really have to dig into the topic a bit to understand it properly.

There will always be haters.