Power and Temp
System power is measured at the wall in Watts and represents the total system load. Our power supply is a Seasonic Prime 1000W Titanium. Temperature is measured via GPUz and room temperature of the testing rig was at 71F while testing.
Wattage
Let’s first talk about the Wattage, because this is where the Radeon RX 5600 XT is extremely impressive. The Wattage on our graph is represented by the blue bar graph, lower is better. You can see that with the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC Pro the total system Wattage is only 242W. This is even lower than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti at 245W. Keep in mind that the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro has a high factory overclock also and is up to 20% faster than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. Yet, with this performance boost the factory overclocked Radeon RX 5600 XT is only as power-hungry as the lesser performing GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
In fact, it appears that the GeForce RTX 2060 is the most power-hungry video card here pulling 286W total system power. That’s 18% more power than the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro, and yet in so many games, they perform very close to each other. It takes more power for the RTX 2060 to reach the level of performance the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro delivers, and that’s with its factory overclock! Without a factory overclock the Radeon RX 5600 XT would be even more efficient power-wise.
For the first time in a long time AMD is ahead of the power efficiency curve, and the competing NVIDIA GPU is actually the power-hungry one. It’s been a long time since that has happened.
Temperature
Now let’s talk temperature. The light orange bar represents the package or GPU temperature, the dark orange bar represents GPUz’s “Hot Spot” sensor reading only on AMD GPUs. In terms of temperature, the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro is perhaps running a little hotter than we’d expect. We have no other Radeon RX 5600 XT’s to compare it with however, so that is just conjecture. However, the Radeon RX 5700 which is much faster is actually running cooler on the package temperature and only a few degrees hotter on the peak temperature. The GeForce RTX 2060 is also running cooler at 71c despite it consuming more power.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT is consuming the least power but is also running the warmest here. It could be down to a simple thing as the fan curve not being more aggressive. We know that the fans on the XFX video card run at 34% to achieve this temperature, so there is room for them to spin up much more. At 34% fan speed though the video card is super quiet. Noise is not a problem due to the low fan speed, but the result is higher GPU temps.
We think with the fans running a bit more aggressive the GPU temperatures would come down. Now, this isn’t really an issue, and the GPU is nowhere near thermal throttling. This will not harm your game performance and is perfectly fine.
When we overclock the video card, we will manually turn the fan speed up so we can get the maximum overclock. We will see how fast we need to run it to get it down to the lower 70’s. We will also have to review more Radeon RX 5600 XT’s so that we can compare the GPU temps. It just seemed a bit odd to us that the least power-hungry video card running very efficiently is also running the warmest. The plus side though, no noise issues.