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.
By default, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition pulled 308.8W board power, and 265.6W GPU chip power. This puts it as the most power-efficient video card on this graph, well under the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE. In fact, it’s on par with the power draw from the Radeon RX 7900 XT, and yet much much faster in performance. It uses almost 150W less power than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FE, yet is much faster.
When we overclocked the GeForce RTX 4080 FE board power rose to 323.9W, an increase of 5% board power or only 15W of board power. At this level, it still uses less power than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. This is exactly in line with the performance increase we received, so the power increase vs performance increase is nearly a 1:1 ratio.
At stock settings, the GeForce RTX 4080 FE has a GPU temp of 61.5c and a Hot Spot of 72.8c. This again runs cooler than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti which is at 75.8c GPU and 84.5c GPU. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT actually run warmer than the GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition.
Granted, the fans are running at 100%, but when overclocked the GeForce RTX 4080 FE is running at 58.3c GPU and 69.1c Hot Spot. These temperatures are the lowest on the graph, so we can see that the cooler configuration is not holding back overclocking potential.
GPU-Z Sensor Data
The first screenshot of GPU-Z above is at Default, and the second screenshot of GPU-Z is at Overclocked.