Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Power Consumption
By default, this card's power target is set to an aggressive 300W. Not surprisingly, that limit is hit during our gaming and torture tests. Increasing the target (using Afterburner) to ~330W takes the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme to its practical ceiling, providing you don't come up short in the GPU quality lottery. Significantly higher settings, or even a shunt mod, would have little effect given the current firmware.
Our test sample's GP102 processor isn't the best. But it's good enough to hit ~2 GHz at 1.062V, so long as the card stays under 50°C. Below 65°C, 1987 MHz is still sustainable at 1.05V. Over time and under load, the voltage settles around 1.043V. We'll soon see that this small reserve allows a certain amount of overclocking headroom if we force the fan to maintain a temperature under 64°C.
The voltages during our stress test are, of course, significantly lower.
Gaming Power Consumption
Let's break the power consumption measurement into separate, higher-resolution lines for each supply rail over a two-minute interval. In spite of our intelligent low-pass filter, occasional spikes remain visible. In places, they reach up to 343W. On average, however, this card remains in line with its 300W power target.
The graph corresponding to our current measurement looks just as hectic.
Stress Test Power Consumption
Faced with a more consistent load, power consumption does rise a little. However, the peaks are almost completely eliminated. Instead, we see where GPU Boost kicks in and brutally limits power use. This keeps the card below its specified power target.
The isolated current readings behave similarly.
Maximum Overclock Stress Test
Average power consumption doesn't exceed 330W, even after applying a manual overclock and increasing the power target to its maximum setting. We do, however, record some peaks above 360W.
Our current measurements don't reveal any abnormalities in the distribution of load on the supply rails.
Ever since the launch of AMD's Radeon RX 480, we've been asked to include this metric in our reviews. But Zotac's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme gives us no reason to be concerned about load on the motherboard's 16-lane PCIe 3.0 slot. A 5A reading can only be considered moderate use.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content
