Power and Temperature
To test the power and temperature we perform a manual run-through in Cyberpunk 2077 at “Ultra” settings for real-world in-game data. We use GPU-Z sensor data to record the results. We report on the GPU-Z sensor data for “Board Power” and “GPU Chip Power” when available for our Wattage data.
In terms of board power as reported by GPU-Z overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition has increased board power draw by 12%. This makes it the highest board power draw out of the bunch (minus the Radeon RX 6900 XT which does not report board power in GPU-Z). Considering the average performance bump was around 7-8% this power jump to achieve that performance bump is a bit over the performance advantage. Meaning it requires more power versus performance to achieve that extra performance.
This again is most likely due to the higher power demand of GDDR6X memory. If you did not overclock the memory, the power demand would be much more efficient, lighter, and would equal the performance jump.
When we look only at the GPU Chip Power Draw as reported by GPU-Z we find the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT takes the cake. This is not a good thing, that means it is drawing much more power just on the GPU alone. Overclocking the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE has increased GPU Chip Power by 7%. This shows us that it is indeed the memory that is causing the larger power drain, GPU alone equals the performance bump we saw.
We did set the fans to 100% to ensure the highest possible overclock. With the fans at 100%, and the overclock we achieved, temperatures were 66c on the GPU, which is 11% cooler than the GPU temperature at default clock speed and fan speed. The fan speed at 100% was loud and would be heard inside a case.