We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.
In terms of total system power draw, we measured consumption at the 475W mark, an increase of just over 20W compared the Founders Edition.
We also use GPU-Z to measure Board Power (graphics card-only power draw). This is currently only available for Nvidia cards, which is why we have excluded AMD results from the chart. Aside from the fact this is software-based reporting, and not a hardware measurement of the PCIe power cables and PCIe slot (for that we’d need something like PCAT), this should provide us more accurate data to work with as it is measuring only the GPU power, and not total system power which is a fundamentally imprecise measurement.
The reason for the increase in total system power draw, is the RTX 3080 Eagle has a 340W power target, and we see it hitting that target almost exactly when looking at only total board power of each card. This is exactly 20W higher than the Founders Edition, so hardly a huge increase, but 320W was always quite a lot to begin with for a single GPU.