GTX 1080 Ti Power Consumption: How Much Power Does The GTX 1080 Ti Use?
The GTX 1080 Ti is Nvidia’s best GPU from their 10-series GPUs. Although this is now considered an old relic the GTX 1080 Ti still provides pretty good performance, when you play modern-day video games.
With this card producing a lot of performance back in the day, let’s take a look at how much power this card uses.
How Many Watts Does The GTX 1080 Ti Use?
The GTX 1080 Ti has a TGP or Total Graphics Power of 250 Watts, which is the typical wattage it produces. When gaming you should expect to see an average of around 230 watts. However, when idle The GTX 1080 Ti only uses 10 Watts of Power.
The power consumption of your GPU will change depending on what games you are playing, and what applications you are using on your computer.
Another thing to note is the idle power consumption. The idle power consumption of the GTX 1080 Ti is 10 watts.
The idle power consumption of a GPU will increase for every monitor you have in your setup. The more monitors you use the higher your idle power consumption will be.
For example, when the GTX 1080 Ti is introduced to a multi-monitor setup it will have a power draw of 11 watts when idle.
This is very good considering it only increased by 1 watt when we added a second monitor to our setup. Most GPUs, will usually at least double in wattage.
When you are looking and comparing a GPUs power consumption, you want to look at the GPU TGP or Total Graphics Power, which shows the base power draw you will get when using your GPU for things such as gaming
When talking about power consumption, you might hear the phrase “TDP” used interchangeably with the phrase “TGP”. Essentially TGP and TDP are the same things, but TDP is the total power consumption of a component and TGP is the total power consumption of a GPU specifically.
You should also note that the TGP of a GPU isn’t the true maximum power draw of the specific graphics card, and the power consumption can be increased when computing graphically intensive tasks and while overclocking.
With the GTX 1080 Ti, the maximum recorded power draw of this GPU is around 300 watts, which is a pretty extreme increase, but this will only happen on occasion, when your power spikes due to a very graphics-intensive event, or when you do major overclocking to your GPU.
GTX 1080 Ti Power Consumption Compared To Other GPUs
The GPUs power consumption is compared using TGP. It is essential to know and compare your graphics cards to other similar models because it will help you get a grasp on the amount of power your system is going to use.
Here is a comparison of a few graphics cards that are around the performance range of the GTX 1080 Ti.
| GPU | TGP |
| RTX 4070 Ti | 285 Watts |
| RTX 3080 Ti | 350 Watts |
| RTX 2080 Ti | 260 Watts |
| GTX 1080 Ti | 250 Watts |
| GTX 1080 | 180 Watts |
From this table, you can see that the GTX 1080 Ti has a similar TGP to the other high-end GPUs from Nvidia.
What to take in here is that with every new GPU generation, the thermal graphics power of each GPU gets somewhat higher, with the exception of the RTX 4070 Ti.
From the GTX 1080 Ti to the RTX 3080 Ti, you can see that there is a power draw difference of 100 watts, this is a very significant increase of power, but when you look at the newest 40-series cards you can see that Nvidia is slowly lowering the TGP of there GPUs and making them a lot more power efficient.
When we take a step back and compare the GTX 1080 Ti to a GPU of the same generation, we can see that there is a huge power consumption increase compared to the GTX 1080, which is only a little bit worse than the 1080 Ti.
Check out: “What Does Ti Mean in a GPU?”
With that in mind we can see that by today’s standards the GTX 1080 Ti is a pretty power-efficient card, but when compared to other 10-series models the GTX 1080 Ti produces the most power and can be seen as a very power-heavy graphics card.
If you want to compare more graphics cards on their power consumption and TGP I have provided a database where you can look at dozens of different GPUs and their power consumption, that way you don’t have to do the research yourself.
Check out the Database.
I have also provided the average power consumption when gaming, as well as the average power consumption when idle, that way you can get a better understanding.
What Power Supply Do You Need For The GTX 1080 Ti?
The minimum recommended power supply unit for the GTX 1080 Ti is 600 watts.
However, that is the minimum and I would always recommend getting a power supply that is a little higher than the minimum recommendation, and here is why.
Going from personal experience you should always go a little bit above the minimum recommended PSU that the manufacturer recommends because there is a very likely possibility that you will go over that power requirement once your computer is fully built, or upgraded.
In my opinion, I would make sure to have 650 Watt power supply, that way I will have an extra 50 watts of wiggle room to do any hardware upgrades, or overclocking in the future.
Another reason to have a slightly higher power supply than recommended is that your computer will randomly have power spikes when under intense load, if your PSU just meets the needs of your computer and experiences a power spike, it could damage your PSU or even other parts of your computer.
Trust me, this is what happened with my first computer, and I don’t want it to happen to you.
Although there are many power supply brands and different qualifications out there I would recommend you go for something that is at least 80 Plus certified that comes from a trusted brand such as EVGA, or Corsair.
This will provide you with power supply hardware that is very reliable and can save you on your energy bill as well.
The reason for this is that a power supply unit that is not certified can take a significant amount of electricity out of your wall that doesn’t do anything. Not only that, but power supplies from a brand that isn’t trusted can damage other parts of your computer, or have underlying issues that you will experience sooner or later.
For this reason, I would recommend getting the Corsair RMX series 650 Watt PSU.
The Corsair RMX Series Power Supply is a 650 Watt PSU, that is 80 Plus Gold Certified.
The reason why I am recommending this power supply is that Corsair is a very reliable and well-known brand, their PSU comes with a 2-year warranty, and it is also Gold certified.
This means this power supply will do a good job of taking the power that it needs to run your system (Not using excess power from your home.)
