We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.
Total system power draw comes in just shy of the 500W mark for the RTX 3090 Eagle OC. This isn't too much more than the aftermarket RTX 3080s we have reviewed, but it is still right up there as one of the most power hungry GPUs we have ever tested.
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.
Looking at board power-only, we can see the RTX 3090 Eagle OC has a 350W power target. This is just 10W more than the RTX 3080 Eagle OC or RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio, and 30W higher than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition.