Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

We measured total system power draw at 330W during our stress test, which is essentially on par with the GTX 1080 Ti, and only a touch ahead of the RTX 2070 Super. Compared to the RTX 2070, it's about 40W higher.

We also use GPU-Z to measure Board Power (graphics card-only power draw). This is currently only available for Nvidia cards, which is why we have excluded AMD results from the chart. Aside from the fact this is software-based reporting, and not a hardware measurement of the PCIe power cables and PCIe slot (for that we’d need something like PCAT), this should provide us more accurate data to work with as it is measuring only the GPU power, and not total system power which is a fundamentally imprecise measurement.

RTX 3070 has a rated total graphics power value of 220W, and using the GPU-Z Board Power metric, we saw average power draw come in at 216W, so pretty much bang on its rated value. This is 4W higher than the RTX 2070 Super, and 42W above the RTX 2070. Crucially, it is also 42W less than the RTX 2080 Ti, despite offering essentially identical gaming performance.

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