Power and Temp
Naturally, the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER FE has the lowest system wattage draw at 325W, it was also the slowest video card here. Next up is the GeForce RTX 2070 FE which only pulls 337W, not much more than the RTX 2060 SUPER. Generally, it was slower than the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU video card, but every now and then it was close to matching performance, at a lot less wattage. The GeForce RTX GPUs continue to be the most efficient.
The reference AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT pulls 362W. The XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II Ultra does pull a lot more wattage at 433W. That’s 20% more. However, it does so because it runs at a higher voltage, 1.200V versus 1.193V, and mainly because it has a higher TDP at 210W plus a factory overclock with much higher frequency. That causes it to consume about 20% more power for all those goodies. That does come with a slight performance boost though.
When we overclocked the video card (remember we can’t change voltage) it rose to 447W, a 3% power increase. This makes sense, we saw about a 3-4% performance bump from overclocking.
This is where it gets interesting. Firstly, the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 FE check-in around 73c, this can be compared with the package temperature on the AMD GPUs. That means those video cards do run cooler on package temperature compared to the reference Radeon RX 5700 XT, much cooler. However, the better cooling on the XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II Ultra puts the package temperature slightly below the two GeForce RTX video cards, which is nice. Then when we overclock and use a high fan speed the temps are a lot lower than the RTX GPUs.
Now, what you really want to know, how much cooler is the XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II Ultra versus the reference AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT video card. Well, according to this charge it has a Junction Temp of 94c while the reference card is at a whopping 101c. So that’s a 7-degree reduction on the “Hot Spot” of the GPU. The package temp falls from 84c to 71c, a 13-degree drop. Those are very significant improvements considering how hot and loud the reference card runs.
When we overclocked the video card and increased the fan speed the Junction Temperature was even a bit lower at 92c and the Package Temp at 66c. Granted, the fan was running around 90% (even though we had it at 100%), so that is certainly well above normal, but it shows that temperature wasn’t holding the GPU back.
Our conclusion is that the XFX Ghost Thermal 2.0 heatsink/fan unit and card design has improved over the reference AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT’s thermals. It improves Junction Temperature and Package Temp by a lot. In addition, the cooler seems adequate for overclocking, it does not appear to be holding back our overclocking attempts. It has the headroom for overclocking and is not beyond its thermal capacity.
As we said at the beginning of the review, we have the latest fixed vBIOS installed. This has made all the difference.
How was the noise level? Obviously, at the high fan speed, it’s loud, but it’s not nearly as bad as the reference blower-style fan on the reference card. It’s a huge difference in favor of the XFX video card. I wouldn’t run at 100% on the AMD reference card, but with the XFX card inside a case, I could run it at 90-100% and be ok with it while gaming.