Hardware setup | Power consumption
Hardware Installation
The installation of any of the Nvidia GeForce cards is straightforward. Once the card is seated into the PC make sure you hook up the monitor and of course any external power connectors like 6/8-pin or the new 12-pin PEG power connectors. Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connectors natively. Purchase a quality power supply, calculate/estimate your peak power consumption for the entire PC and double that number for the power supply as your PSU is most efficient at half the load value. So, if during gaming you consume 300W Watts on average for the entire PC, we'd recommend a 600 Watt power supply as a generic rule.
Once done, we boot into Windows, install the latest drivers and after a reboot, all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed unless you like to tweak the settings, for which you can open the NVIDIA control panel.
Power Consumption
We have moved to PCAT for power consumption testing. PCAT is a precise hardware setup that will measure at the 12V rails as well as the PCIe slot. PCAT originates from NVIDIA, and we see no way that NVIDIA could temper when testing say a Radeon graphics card, making this an extremely handy tool.
This isolated power consumption from other factors if you'd say measure at socket outlet. The new measurements also allow us to provide more precise data, IDLE power consumption. But we'll also start displaying the average power consumption and as we always have done, peak power consumption based on a gaming load.
At desktop IDLE this card consumers 13 Watts. it averages at 196 Watts and small peaks can reach 224 Watt.
Here is our power supply recommendation:
- GeForce RTX 3060 Ti - On your average system we recommend a 500 Watt power supply unit.
- GeForce RTX 3070 - On your average system we recommend a 550 Watt power supply unit.
- GeForce RTX 3080 - On your average system we recommend a 650 Watt power supply unit.
- GeForce RTX 3090 - On your average system we recommend a 750 Watt power supply unit.
If you are going to overclock your GPU or processor, then we do recommend you purchase something with some more stamina. There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have a lot of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. Let's move to the next page where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.
