Can a 650W PSU run the Nvidia RTX 3080?

So Nvidia says to run the RTX 3080 you at least need a 750W power supply. Which is what a lot of people will go for at least if they are building a new system.

Recently when I was reviewing the RTX 3080, I wondered if my older PSU, which in this case was the Corsair RM650x Gold, can actually support and run the RTX 3080 for benchmarking and stuff. Or will it just trip and blow the guts out of it. Now the RM650x Gold from Corsair is a very solid power supply and don’t let the results ahead fool you and you start expecting the same performance by any lower-tier PSU which you already own or are planning to buy. 

I had plans to eventually upgrade to a new PSU rated for higher power and in these times when everything is crazily expensive, I somehow managed to get a good deal on the Antec HCG GOLD 1000, which is a 1000 watts power supply.

The other options from other brands at 850 watts were priced very closely to this as I was really not able to find a good deal on them, so I put just a little more money in and got this PSU, knowingly it was a massive overkill for my system. 

So I ran a bunch of tests stressing my CPU which in this case is the Ryzen 3900X on an ASUS TUF X570 motherboard and other stuff which is on your screen with of course the Founder’s edition RTX 3080. 

The RTX 3080 needs two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to power on, so if you own an AIB partner card that needs more than 2 of them, then you can defer from this analysis. I don’t have any fancy stuff in my case except for 3 ARGB fans and 3 non-lit fans. And then there’s a fan on the CPU cooler, with 4 kits of 16GB DDR4 ram, out of which 2 are lit. So yeah, in lumpsum, even at full load the system shouldn’t eat up more than 550 or 570 watts of power. 

So running FurMark at 4K resolution which utilizes most of your GPU performance simultaneously with Cinebench R23 which uses all of your CPU cores, I could really see no dip in GPU clocks on either the 650-watt Corsair and the 1000 watt Antec. They both ran comfortably during my 20-minute test run and they both ran almost up to 2 GHz frequency. 

The power consumption scale of both of these PSUs in the same tests stayed around the same level and on both the PSUs, the RTX 3080 was easily able to reach its max power consumption of 320 watts at stock settings.

And if you had doubts over the CPU performance, well, the CPU clocked just slightly better on the 1000 watts Antec as compared to Corsair 650. But the difference in clocks was about 1 or 2 percent max. It’s a minor difference, but a difference nonetheless. 

The power consumption was about the same though as it ranged around 141 watts on both the PSUs. So a big frigging 0 here in terms of any performance difference. 

Checking the total power consumption of the whole system during all of these different tests, the Antec tried to consume less power than Corsair. Even though both of them were Gold rated PSUs, the Antec had more headroom, and maybe that’s why it performed more efficiently. 

So yeah, clearly a GOOD 650W PSU can run your RTX 3080 without any issues at stock settings. But there was an instance wherein a specific boss stage during one of my doom eternal gameplays, the game just shut off twice. And then only in the third attempt, I was able to clear it. So that could have been either because the card might have tried to pull more power than the PSU could supply at that specific moment. Or it could just have been a bug. As the RTX 3080 has tendencies of spiking even above its permissible TDP sometimes, as some of the more veteran reviewers like Steve from Gamers nexus have specified in their articles. So keeping that in mind, it’s probably safe to invest in a higher rated PSU but you don’t need to panic about it till you can find one at an acceptable price these days. 

But if you plan to overclock your card, then forget you ever watched this video. Get an 850-watts rated power supply at least. 

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Safe safe humans. That’s all for today. MuBot out.