Energy consumption and efficiency:
We finally have the means to effectively monitor the power consumption of our graphics cards thanks to the Benchlab telemetry system. We’ll now be able to carry out a complete analysis of our graphics card’s total power consumption via the dedicated 3 x PCIe and 2 x 12VHPWR power cables. But that’s not all, because we also need to be able to measure the power supplied via the PCIe slot. So we’re going to use a PCI-E PMD adapter from the ElmorLabs shop. This will give us the overall power consumption of the graphics card under test, completely independently. Here’s a series of photos of our Benchlab installation, to which we’ll be devoting a dedicated test in a few weeks’ time.
These various readings will be taken via Benchlab’s dedicated application. The photos below were taken with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB FE graphics card to illustrate our power consumption readings.
To get the total power consumption, we’ll read the 12VHPWR Power consumption, which corresponds to the power supply to the card via its 16-pin mini-connectors, and the EPS1 reading, which supplies the adapter. We export the readings, which are taken every 500 ms, and calculate the average power consumption in the Cyberpunk 2077 game in 4K rasterisation with the graphics options in Ultra and in 4K with ray tracing in Ultra, DLSS Performance x2 and path tracing.
Power consumption in Cyberpunk 2077 :
We were very pleased with the RTX 5080 Founders Edition’s power consumption, which was fairly close to that of the RTX 4080 Super. The FPS/consumption ratio is in favour of the latter. This controlled power consumption means that our Founders Edition model heats up very little and makes very little noise.
But with the ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC Edition, things get a little more complicated. In 2160p rasterisation, our model of the day saw its power consumption increase by 40 watts. We found that this factory overclocked model delivered a 3.8% gain in gaming performance, while at the same time power consumption increased by more than 12%. The ratio is therefore more unfavourable for our model of the day.
As a reminder, ASUS recommends an 850-watt power supply with a ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC Edition, but if you’re planning to overclock, you’ll need 1,000 watts.