ASUS ROG Astral RTX 50 power connector sensors now work under Linux
ASUS ROG Astral graphics cards can now expose their 12V-2×6 power connector monitoring data under Linux. Developer Krzysztof Sokołowski has released astral-hwmon, an open-source kernel driver that reads current and voltage from each of the six +12V power connections individually. The driver currently targets ASUS cards equipped with the required monitoring hardware.
What makes ROG Astral cards different is that ASUS placed dedicated monitoring hardware directly on the graphics card PCB. The cards use an ITE IT8915FN monitoring chip , which collects voltage and current data for all six power connections. Typical GeForce RTX 50 cards can report values such as total GPU or board power, but they do not expose six individual connector current readings through this type of dedicated sensor. Software alone cannot add this capability to a card that lacks the required hardware.
Linux can now access the Astral sensors
On Windows, ASUS already uses these sensors for its Power Detector+ feature in GPU Tweak III. The software displays current for every power connection and warns the user when one exceeds the standard 9.2A threshold. ASUS also uses an LED on the card to signal abnormal current without requiring software to be running. Yesterday we reported that ASUS has just added a new feature, an emergency shutdown in case there are issues with power delivery.
© Github The new Linux driver connects the same monitoring hardware to the standard Linux HWMON subsystem. This allows applications that already support HWMON to read the six voltage and current channels without needing a dedicated ASUS monitoring application. The developer has tested the driver on the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 OC. Support for several RTX 5090, RTX 5090D and RTX 5080 Astral variants is expected because they are believed to use the same sensor implementation, but those models have not all been verified by the developer.
The project also includes astral-guard , which checks the readings for abnormal conditions. Its rules include a warning at 9.2A per connection and a critical state at 9.5A. It can also detect current imbalance, a nearly inactive connection while the GPU is drawing power, and low connector voltage. The kernel driver itself is read-only and does not change GPU settings or shut down the system, but I guess that’s something easy to implement at this point.
Sources: Astral-HWMON (GitHub)
