Power and Temperature
For power we are looking at the power report a little differently than the past. For these video cards we are looking at GPUz’s reported “GPU Chip Power Draw Wattage” sensor data. This is not power at the all, nor is it Board Power. It’s the GPU Chip power only that is reported. This is mostly because these AMD video cards do not have Board Power Wattage readings in GPUz, so we have to rely on the GPU Chip Power draw. So just keep in mind for the power, this is not total system Wattage or even total Board Power. For temperature testing ambient temperature in the room was 70F.
In terms of power, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE actually has the lowest GPU Chip Power Draw in Wattage at 199W. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is already much higher at default at 279W. Overclocking the video card further increases this to 300W, an increase of 8%. Note that this does not involve Voltage increasing. If Voltage was unlocked, that number would be much much higher. From this though, we can see how much of a power hog the GPU is when overclocking.
In terms of temperature, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT’s GPU is 75c which runs cooler than the RTX 3080 FE. When we overclocked the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT we set the fans to 100%, which actually maxed out at 90% apparently. This kept the GPU at 61c maximum while gaming. This is cool enough that we are not being held back by the thermal properties of the cooler.
We did bump the overclock up slightly as we mentioned on Page 1 to 2500-2700MHz, when we did this the GPU temp did jump up to 64c with maximum fans. It seems that if we also had to add Voltage, the thermal properties of the cooler may then start to become limited. It would take 100% fans just to maintain a good cool temperature. With the fans having to be run this high, it shows there is definite room for improvement in the cooling on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT if you want to overclock very high with Voltage adjustment or higher power delivery or TDP.
In terms of fan noise, we were surprised how quiet the fans run at 90% rotation. They do not whizz or whine or have any very loud noise. For the speed they run at, they were remarkably well kept in terms of sound output.