GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI review - Power Consumption

Hardware Installation

Installation of any of the Nvidia GeForce cards is really easy. Once the card is seated into the PC make sure you hook up the monitor and of course any external power connectors like 6 and/or 8-pin PEG power connectors. Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connectors native (converting them from a Molex Peripheral connector anno 2014 we feel is a no-go).

• Download new NVIDIA GeForce drivers here

Once done, we boot into Windows, install the latest drivers and after a reboot all should be working.

Load up the Nvidia control panel and check if SLI mode was successfully enabled, maximize 3D performance is the setting you are after, once applied properly you will see that green indicator line showing 2-way SLI.

Power Consumption

Let's have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed. The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We stress the GPU to the max, and the processor as little as possible. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load. Our test system is based on an eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition setup on the X99 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.40 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We'll be calculating the GPU power consumption here, not the total PC power consumption.

Measured Power Consumption

Mind you, the system wattage is measured at the wall socket side and there are other variables like PSU power efficiency. So this is an estimated value, albeit a very good one. Below, a chart of relative power consumption. Again, the Wattage shown is the card with the GPU(s) stressed 100%, showing only the peak GPU power draw, not the power consumption of the entire PC and not the average gaming power consumption.

Power consumption	TDP in KWh	KWh price	2 hrs day	4 hrs day
Graphics card measured TDP	0,364	0,23	0,17	0,33
Cost 5 days per week / 4 hrs day	€ 1,67
Cost per Month	€ 7,26
Cost per Year 5 days week / 4 hrs day / €	€ 87,07
Cost per Year 5 days week / 4 hrs day / $	$ 114,93

Power supply recommendation:

• GeForce GTX 1080 - On your average system the card we recommend a 550 Watts power supply unit.
• GeForce GTX 1080 SLI - On your average system the cards we recommend a 750 Watts power supply unit.

If you are going to overclock your GPU or processor, then we do recommend you purchase something with some more stamina. At half the PSU load (50% usage) your PSU is the most energy efficient hence we recommend that bit extra. There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What could happen if your PSU can't cope with the load is:

• Bad 3D performance
• Crashing games
• Spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• Freezing during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

Let's move to the next page where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.