Power and Temp
All Wattage is taken at the wall for total system power Wattage. Ambient room temperature at the time of testing was 70F in an open-air test-bench system.
Looking at this graph there are some good things and some bad things. First, the good things, the temperature results on the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING are excellent. At default operation, the GPU temp only rose to 73c. This is a lot cooler than the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition which hit 80c on the GPU. It’s also cooler than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE which hit 84c.
When we overclocked the video card we did set the fans to 100%, and with the overclock GPU temp was only 61c. This is a huge reduction, even though we are overclocking as high as possible. This level of fan rotation was not required at all for this overclock, we just wanted to make sure we hit the highest overclock we could. It is clear that the iCX3 cooling is not holding the GPU back at all for potential overclocking.
At this 73c temperature, the noise was also not an issue, the video card was very quiet, I dare say even more quiet than the Founders Edition. Therefore this shows how good EVGA’s iCX3 cooling technology really is, EVGA’s whole setup here keeps the GPU very cool and the noise level quiet.
Now to the obvious bad news, it’s a power monster. This is very evident above. At default, the configuration with the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING is eating a total of 561 whopping Watts. That’s a huge amount of power draw. It’s 19% more power than the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition system total power is drawing.
Then, when we overclock it the Wattage increases another 4% to 585W. That is the highest power draw for our system that we have seen in a very long time with a video card. Only in some specific AMD and NVIDIA launches far in the past have we seen numbers that high for a single video card.
Considering the power draw increase of 19+% wattage over the GeForce RTX 3080 FE, we did not see the same performance advantage. The power draw far exceeds the actual performance gain we experienced. This means the gain in power is very in-efficient. It takes a dump truck load of power, to get a 6-10% performance increase in games. Imagine if we added Voltage to the GPU, the power draw would increase even more. The power draw is pretty high with this video card, we recommend well-built power supplies.