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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • Before you make a decision on which you want to get, you should calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for each. For TCO, you must account for the initial asking price of the models of GPUs you are considering, and the estimated operating costs, which is the function of the electricity price you pay (usually per KWh) and the amount of energy used in the card’s lifetime, approximated of course. With two similarly power-hungry cards, you can usually ignore this, but depending on which model of the 7900 XTX you are looking at, there could be as much as 200W of difference in average power consumption while gaming, between a 4080 and a 7900 XTX, and depending on your usage patterns and electricity costs, that can drive TCO up on the AMD card much faster than on the 4080. With the 4080 Super incoming at a rumored $1000 MSRP, choosing between the two might come down to the operational costs, so keep that in mind. One guy in the Netherlands was paying $0.44 per KWh and gaming 11 hours a day. In his case, even though the 4080 was more than 300 euros more expensive, the difference in operating costs led to the 4080 coming in overall less expensive in just one year of use than the 7900 XTX. Now, that is quite an extreme case, and TCO is a personalized metric, so I’m not saying that a 4080 is always the better choice, just that if you are considering costs, don’t forget about operating costs.