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 GPU-Z sensor data to record the results. We report on the GPU-Z sensor data for “Board Power” and “GPU Chip Power” when available for our Wattage data. For temperature data, we report the GPU (Edge Temp of the GPU or Package Temp) as well as Hot Spot (Junction Temperature) when available for our temperature data.
In power consumption, the Radeon RX 6900 XT has a GPU Chip power draw of 255W. The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE video card has an increase up to 303W, which is a 19% increase in GPU Chip power draw. When we overclock the video card that rises to 387W, which is even higher than the RTX 3090 Ti, that’s another 28% power increase. The video card is definitely power-hungry, and overclocking pushes it into a very high power-demand territory.
In our testing, we also found out that the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT runs at a GPU Voltage of 1.175V. However, the new Radeon RX 6950 XT is running at a higher Voltage of 1.200V. Therefore the GPU should be running hotter than the 6900 XT and require a bit more cooling.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT uses AMD’s reference cooling, and on it we can see the GPU Temp reaches 81c and Hot Spot at 95c, it is the hottest running video card and GPU here, it even runs hotter than the RTX 3090 Ti. The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 6950 XT PURE is a custom video card, and SAPPHIRE’s TRI-X cooling is coming into play here and makes it the coolest running card with a GPU temp of 72c and Hot Spot of 93c. That custom cooling really does wonders and keeps the new RX 6950 XT very cool. When we overclock it, at 100% fan speeds, the GPU temp is 60c and Hot Spot at 90c. Cooling is not holding this video card back from overclocking at all.
GPU-Z Sensor Data
The first two screenshots of GPU-Z above are on the Default “Primary BIOS” and the second two screenshots of GPU-Z are on the “Secondary BIOS” (OC BIOS).
The two screenshots of GPU-Z above are on our manual Overclock that we achieved.