RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Power Consumption Dropped By Up to 30%

Resident Twitter leaker @kopite7kimi updated the public with new power consumption expectations for the upcoming RTX 4080 and RTX 4070. The wattage of the RTX 4070 has gone down a bit, to 285W from a previously projected 300W. The RTX 4080's power consumption target meanwhile plummeted to just 320W, matching the RTX 3080's official TBP. Previous rumors suggested it might have a 450W TBP for the xx80 series GPU.

We don't know why the power expectations have gone down so unexpectedly, especially with the RTX 4080. However, Kopite posted another tweet around the same time, saying the high 40-series power consumption has become problematic, resulting in a reduction of power output to Ampere levels. Presumably, clock speeds and performance may have been adjusted as well.

We don't know Kopite's sources directly, but we can presume from this data that Nvidia's engineers have been desperately trying to get these rumored ultra-high power consumption figures to work on the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 but found the TSMC 5nm silicon didn't behave as desired at these extreme watts and amps.

As usual, apply liberal helpings of salt as there's no official word on any of this stuff yet. Kopite does have a strong track record for being an accurate leaker, however, and there have been leaks of Ada's high power consumption running for a long time. Some of that might be speculation thanks to the introduction of the new 600W 16-pin power connector, and there's still a chance Nvidia's 40-series GPUs will go back up in power consumption.

The lowered power consumption could be good or bad news for gamers. On one side, the lower wattage will reduce the TBP of the top-tier GPUs by a considerable amount, making them much easier to cool and thereby reducing system heat and noise levels as well.

On the other side, a 29% reduction in power use on the RTX 4080 could substantially reduce GPU performance. That's the problem with early rumors and leaks. Nvidia is also working to determine the best clock speeds, voltages, and power levels for its new Ada architecture, so everything is still in a state of flux.

That's part of why we've long been skeptical of claims that Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPUs could use as much as 600W of power. That's a massive increase compared to Ampere. There will undoubtedly be some custom designs that push the new GPUs to the limit, but just because the new PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR 16-pin connector can pull up to 600W doesn't mean cards that use it will draw that much power. We should get official confirmation of the RTX 40-series GPU specs in the near future when it's officially announced, judging by the increasing rate of leaks happening right now.