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. For temperature data, we report the GPU (Edge Temp of the GPU or Package Temp) as well as Hot Spot (Junction Temperature) when available for our temperature data.
When we look at power differences between the GeForce RTX 3090 FE and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE the results are quite interesting. The RTX 3080 Ti does have a higher clock speed, and there is a pretty big RAM difference between both cards. We actually found that the Board Power was just a couple Watts higher on the RTX 3080 Ti, and the GPU Chip power was about 8W higher on the RTX 3090 FE.
Overall, they are a lot closer in power than we thought they’d be. Though it makes sense when you look at their performance and how close they are in performance. Neither one is drastically different than the other in terms of power, so they are similar. The Radeon RX 6900 XT on the other hand has a very high GPU Chip power draw, much higher than the two NVIDIA GPUs, so its power draw is higher.
Though power was similar between the RTX 3080 Ti FE and RTX 3090 FE, the temperature is not. The GeForce RTX 3090 FE runs a lot hotter than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE. The GPU temperature is up to 77c on the RTX 3090 FE, while it’s around 74c on the RTX 3080 Ti. The hot spot temp is also up at 88c on the RTX 3090 FE versus 80c on the RTX 3080 Ti. Though the Radeon RX 6900 XT takes the cake on temperatures, it’s flat out even hotter at 81c GPU temp and 95c hot spot temp, wow. Therefore, while the RTX 3090 FE is hotter than the RTX 3080 Ti FE, it can’t hold a candle to how hot the 6900 XT runs.