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.
The AMD GPUs do not report Board Power in GPU-Z, so we look and compare the GPU Chip Power reading only. Overclocking the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has increased the GPU Chip Power by 15%. This is more than the actual gameplay performance improvements we experienced, therefore it is not a very efficient overclock. you still have to also consider the board power, and memory overclocks, and everything else that would increase the power from overclocking. The end result is a very power-hungry video card when overclocked.
When we overclocked the video card, we set the fan speed at 100% Radeon Software, but in reality, according to GPU-Z it was running around 89% fan speed for us. With the overclock, the GPU temperature was reduced down to 61c with this high fan speed, from 82c, so that was working great. The hot spot was still a bit warm but better than the 95c without the fan speed increase.
Even at 86c though it was way hotter than the GIGABYTE RTX 3090 GAMING OC, and that’s with the higher fan speed, so the RX 6900 XT runs pretty hot overclocked. The temperature did not hamper our overclocks, but the cooling could certainly be improved if you wanted to keep this video card overclocked for long-term ownership. You’d be smart to get a custom card with custom cooling if you could if that was your goal.