ty_ger07
kraade
Not for nothing , there's 14 pages of conspiracy about the great under preforming 3080 450 watt XOC bios and 0 pages of people complaining my Kingpin wont hit 1000 watts on the 1000 watt bios, go figure 
Because one has a perfcap reason of pwr, and one doesn't. People only care when the perfcap reason is pwr and it shouldn't be. Go figure.
It has nothing to do with trying to force the card to be inefficient. It has everything to do with the card being neutered for no apparent reason.
I read apparently the 3080 FTW3 was going to be a 2 pin card and late on EVGA morphed it into a 3 pin, but now the third pin on the vanilla 3080 is some sort of "half job" rather than the proper way to do power delivery for 3 pins. No idea if this is just speculation or not (probably just incorrect owner guesswork), but it would help explain things. So the card is basically a 2.5 pin rather than 3 pin.
It does seem to make sense when you do testing, the 3rd pin on the 3080 FTW3 is just "busted". Can't seem to draw more than 75w of power when other 3080s from other manufacturers happily draw 120w+ on the 3rd pin. Here is a result from a Palit 3080 3 pin on a 450w BIOS
PCI-e slot 47W
8-pin #1 139W
8-pin #2 119W
8-pin #3 139W
Total 444W
Whatever they did, they quietly decided internally it was a mistake and fixed it on the 12GB model and Ti models which have no issue with a 450w BIOS and even beyond. It's incredibly frustrating to anyone who watercools the card and the only way I'd RMA is if EVGA accepted it was a flaw and that a refurb would fix power draw. But I can't get EVGA to even admit anything, presumably because they don't want it officially stated the original 3080s and even some 3090s it seems, have design
flaws around power delivery.
Though I do think some people got them to admit the vanilla 3090 had power draw issues. Given the potential for a 3090 in terms of guzzling power, yeah, harder to sweep that under the rug. A 3080 can perform well with a 400w ceiling, it's just if you watercool that extra 50w can make quite a difference when you're power limited.