New Linux Driver Enables 12VHPWR Monitoring For ASUS ROG Astral Graphics Cards

For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards.

With modern graphics cards sporting 12VHPWR power connectors, many of them now sport a sensor monitoring IC. Unfortunately, to date I have never seen any 12VHPWR sensor monitoring under Linux until now when an open-source developer took to creating a driver for his ASUS ROG Astral graphics card.

Open-source developer Krzysiek Sokolowski took to creating the out-of-tree "astral-hwmon" driver for 12VHPWR monitoring for ASUS ROG Astral graphics cards to propagate the six individual 12VHPWR pin currents and voltages to the Linux HWMON interfaces. This has been tested on his ASUS ROG Astral hardware that has an ITE IT8915FN ASIC for monitoring. With HWMON integration, it then works with all the user-space Linux monitoring applications supporting that standardized interface.


The ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC is where the driver's testing has been happening while the ROG Astral RTX 5090D OC, ROG Astral RTX 5090 Matrix, ROG Astral RTX 5090 LC, ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC, ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC White, ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC White, and ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC Hatsune Miku models should work as well.


The kernel driver itself is just for monitoring and doesn't make any actions on its own around 12VHPWR failure detection. But as part of the out-of-tree repository there is astral-guard as a program that can be used with this kernel driver with its rules derived from ASUS Power Detector+ and related Windows software. The astral-guard code can provide warnings and if any critical behavior is deteccted.

Those with an ASUS ROG Astral NVIDIA graphics card and interested in 12VHPWR monitoring under Linux can find this open-source driver via GitHub .