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Power Consumption
Naturally, the default power target of 275W is used in full during gaming workloads and our stress test. Increasing this target using MSI's Afterburner Extreme software to the feasible maximum of about 350W is more than sufficient, so long as you don't get too unlucky in the silicon lottery.
The chip on our test sample isn't the best, but it's good enough to reach just about 1947 MHz at 1.05V, provided the card stays under 50°C. Out of the box, and below 65°C, 1936 MHz is still achievable at 1.05V.
Gaming Loop
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 330W without overclocking. On average, however, this card exceeds its 275W power target by only 3W.
The graph corresponding to our current measurement looks just as hectic.
Torture Test
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 to start limiting power use. On average, this ensures that the card hits the designated power target almost spot on.
The isolated current readings behave similarly.
Load On The Motherboard Slot
Ever since the launch of AMD's Radeon RX 480, we've been asked to include this metric in our reviews. But Galax's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti HoF gives us no reason to be concerned about load on the motherboard's 16-lane PCIe 3.0 slot. In fact, our highest reading is just over 3A, leaving plenty of headroom under the PCI-SIG's 5.5A ceiling.
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