Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB Review

We have recently revamped our GPU power consumption testing. Previously we would measure the total system power draw with each graphics card installed. Given that the rest of the components did not change, this gave us an idea of the relative power consumption of each graphics card, but we could not be more specific than that.

Now, however, thanks to Cybenetics Labs and its Powenetics Project, we are able to measure the power consumption of the graphics card alone, giving much more precise and accurate data. Essentially, this works by installing sensors in the PCIe power cables, as well as the PCIe slot itself thanks to a special riser card. This data is recorded using specialist software provided by Cybenetics Labs and given it polls multiple times a second (between 6 and 8 times a second, based on my observations) we can track the power consumption in incredible detail over any given amount of time.

You can read more about the Powenetics Project over HERE.

As with previous testing, a reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes. This stress test (20 runs) produces approximately 4300 data entries in the Powenetics software, which we can then export to an Excel file and analyse further. Here we present the average continuous power consumption of each graphics card across the entire 20 run test.

Given its TDP is 260W, to see the RTX 2080 Ti drawing 267W under load is pretty much bang on with what we'd expect. You will note that the RTX 2080 is actually drawing more power in the above test – something we discuss further in the RTX 2080's own dedicated review.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Power Testing

Just to test things further, we also measured the power consumption of the cards when running the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 4K, with the Highest IQ preset.

As you can see, this hardly affected the power draw of the RTX 2080 Ti – the difference is barely 1 watt.

Overall the card isn't as light on the electricity as the GTX 1080 Ti – but it is not much more power hungry either. Vega 64 remains the most power hungry card we have tested by some margin.

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