Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

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

It's no shock to see the RTX 3080 sitting top of the chart here, with total system power draw about 70W higher than the RTX 2080 Ti, or 110W higher than with the RTX 2080. This is expected considering the GPU's TGP is rated at 320W, the highest for any single-GPU that I can remember.

While total system power draw isn't an ideal metric for comparisons, we're seeing roughly 33% higher power draw than the RTX 2080. Directly comparing the rated TGPs of each card, the 3080's is 42% higher, while delivering on average 68% increased performance at 4K – certainly suggesting some efficiency improvement relative to that GPU.

On the other hand, the 3080 is 31% faster than the 2080 Ti at 4K, while it's rated TGP is 28% higher, so that is much more ambiguous when it comes to efficiency improvements.

Ultimately, I'm not sure many people will be too bothered about the increased power. It's certainly not the same situation as something like the GTX 1080, which delivered increased performance at significantly less power than the GTX 980 Ti, but most gamers will simply be glad to be seeing big gen-on-gen performance improvements again, even if power draw has gone up.

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