Detailed Power Consumption and Overclocking

For power consumption measurements, we are still using the methodology that helped us discover the power draw issues of the RX 480 back in 2016.

Our testing involves the use of a National Instruments data acquisition device, which is intercepting the power being sent through the PCI Express bus (12V and 3.3V) as well as the ATX power connectors (12V) before they go to the graphics card and are directly measuring power draw.

On the game side, we are continuing to use Metro: Last Light for power measurement, given its history of being particularly taxing on GPUs in 4K.

Taking a look at total power draw across the lineup, we can notice a few interesting aspects. The RTX 2080 draws ever so slightly less power than the GTX 1080 Ti. Considering the minor performance gap between these two cards, it points to little gained in the way of efficiency moving from Turing to Pascal.

The RTX 2080 Ti hovers around 250W of power usage, about 25W more than the RTX 2080 and GTX 1080 Ti.

Taking a deeper look at the RTX 2080 Ti we can find that NVIDIA is actually not utilizing the 3.3V provided from the PCI Express slot, in favor exclusively of 12V from the slot and the additional power connectors.

Overclocking

One of the new software level features of the RTX GPUs is NVIDIA Scanner. This NVIDIA-developed platform allows for automated overclocking and tested of overclocking settings. While NVIDIA Scanner seems promising and is enabled in the beta version of EVGA's new Precision X1 software, it was a bit rough around the edges at the moment. Due to this, we decided to take the manual approach to overclocking.

RTX 2080 Founders Edition

For the RTX 2080, we were able to achieve an overclock of +160 MHz, which allowed us to hit a sustained clock speed of just over 2000 MHz.

As we can see, clocks speeds remain quite stable over the duration of our test in both the stock and overclocked configurations. With our overclock applied, temperatures rise about 5 degrees Celsius from stock to around 75 degrees.

RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition

Overclocking the RTX 2080 Ti provides a similar frequency result as the RTX 2080. With a +190 MHz clock offset, we were able to achieve stable frequencies in the low 2000MHz range.

In an overclocked state, the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Ti was a bit hotter than the RTX 2080, at 80 degrees Celsius. 

Considering the 90 MHz "stock overclock" of the Founders Edition cards, I am pleasantly surprised at the additional overclocking headroom that seems to be evident in Turing. It remains to be seen if third-party cards will be better at overclocking, or will manage to keep the card cooler while doing so, but we are eager to take a look at how those cards fare soon!

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