Power and Temperature
To test the power and temperature we perform a manual run-through in Cyberpunk 2077 at “Ultra” settings for real-world in-game data. We use GPUz sensor data to record the results. We report on the GPUz sensor data for “Board Power” and “GPU Chip Power” when available for our Wattage data.
GPUz only reports GPU Chip Power for AMD GPUs, not Board Power. What we can see though from this graph is that the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU does consume more power than even the GeForce RTX 3070 FE GPU. This is not efficient, as the GeForce RTX 3070 FE was faster most of the time. The fact it does so, with less power, makes it efficient.
The XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT consumes about 3% more GPU power than the reference AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT. This makes sense based on the performance results we experienced. When we overclock it power increases by another 3%. Since we saw some performance improvements as high as 7, or 8 or 10% this small power increase in GPU power is not bad. However, it doesn’t take into account board power, which includes VRAM. At the end of the day, overclocking the XFX RX 6700 XT is going to make it the card that consumes the most power compared to the rest.
GPU Temperature is where the XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319 BLACK RX 6700 XT excels, by a great degree. The new Ghost Thermal cooling solution XFX has employed is fantastic and really is doing a great job at keeping this GPU cool and doing it very quietly. At default, the GPU temperature was only 67c compared to the reference AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT which rose to 75c and was the hottest card here.
That’s an 8 degree Celsius reduction in temperature, and the exciting part here is that it did it at only 36% fan speed or 1206 RPM. When we compare this to the reference AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT it operates by default at 48% fan speed, 1636 RPM to hit 75c. The XFX video card is able to maintain a lower temperature at a lower fan speed and lower fan RPM. This is amazing and really reduces the noise pollution.
When we overclocked it we did set the fans to 100% to ensure the highest possible overclock. We experienced the fans being extremely loud at 100%. They operate at 3329 RPM at 100%. They are extremely annoying, and sound like a rocket taking off. You would not want to run them at 100% even inside a case, it would just be too loud. However, it is a testament to XFX for allowing such a high fan speed if you want it. Look at our temps at 100% fan speed while overclocked, only 47c. That’s just amazing. Loud, but amazing. In reality, you can keep the fans at a lower speed with the overclock and it will work just fine.