NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE Video Card Review – Ampere

By Nathan Kirsch

Temperature, Noise & Power Consumption

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Temperatures:

At idle on our open air test bench we were sitting at around 36C at idle with no fan noise as they don’t spin. After playing PUBG for over an hour at 1440P we found that the temperatures topped out in the 76C range. The fans were running around 1865 RPM at full gaming load, which isn’t bad at all. In fact, the sound level measured eight inches from the front of the video card showed that the RTX 3080 FE was drastically quieter than the RTX 2080 FE and GTX 1080 at both idle and load.

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For load numbers we ran Rainbow Six Siege at 1440P and recorded the peak power number while the in-game benchmark was running. This is done to ensure the results are repeatable.

The system with the GeForce RTX 3080 FE topped out at 524 Watts, which is higher than the 393 Watts of the RTX 2080 FE and 317 Watts of the GTX 1080 FE. Power draw is up on this card, but shouldn’t be a deal breaker for most gamers.

Let’s wrap this up!