AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 Review

Temperature & Power Consumption

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (pictured top) has a larger GPU cooler, so it will be interesting to see how the two cards perform on the temperature front.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 Temperatures:

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Temperatures:

We tested the cards with their default settings and found the AMD Radeon RX 6800 had an idle temperature of 34C (37C hotspot) and the Radeon RX 6800 XT was at 32C (35C hotspot). We ran both cards on a 1440P game title for 30 minutes and found the Radeon RX 6800 reached 71C (81C hotspot) and the Radeon RX 6800 XT hit 74C (91C hotspot). No fans spun at idle as the temperatures were way below the fan start speed of 63C and we noticed the fans on the 6800 spun at 1675 RPM while gaming versus 1350 RPM on the 6800 XT. The noise level on the 6800 XT was lower as a result, but both cards cooling solutions ran quiet.

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For load numbers we ran Rainbow Six Siege at 1440P and recorded the peak power number while the in-game benchmark was running. This is done to ensure the results are repeatable.

Power consumption on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 topped out at 418 Watts and that is just head of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070’s top number of 405 Watts. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT used less power on this benchmark than the GeForce RTX 3080, which is pretty impressive.

NVIDIA PCAT Testing

One of the new tools that we have to look at power consumption is the NVIDIA Power Capture Analysis Tool (PCAT). NVIDIA came up with custom designed board and software utility that captures accurate perf-per-watt and total graphics board performance data.

Here is a look at total PCIe Power for the the GeForce RTX 3070/3080 Founders Edition graphics cards compared to the AMD Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT. All of the cards were running at stock settings and we recorded the power on a standard run of 3DMark Time Spy. Here you can see the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT peaks at 364.2 Watts of power and this is a measurement of just what the card itself is using and nothing else in the system. This is just about 3 Watts above the GeForce RTX 3080 for peak usage, but it was about 10 Watts lower over the duration of the entire benchmark run.

Let’s wrap this up!