Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 XTREME review - 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 and/or 8-pin or new, the 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 the most efficient at half the load value. So if during gaming you consume 300W Watts on average for the entire PC, we would recommend a 600 Watt power supply as a generic rule.

• Download the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers here

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 and the PCIe slot. 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.

Above, the performance mode. The silent BIOS mode is clocked a notch lower and does consume a bit less power, roughly 25 watts can be deducted there. Here is our power supply recommendation:

• GeForce RTX 3060 Ti - On your average system, we recommend a 550 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, we 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.