EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black Video Card 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.

EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black Temperatures:

At idle on our open air test bench we were sitting at around 39.8C at idle with no fan noise as they don’t spin. After playing PUBG for over an hour at 1440P we found that the temperatures topped out at 65.3C range. The GPU coolers two fans were off at idle and running around 1950 RPM at full gaming load. The hot spot temperatures at idle and load were 49.8C and 76.2C, respectively.

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 EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 peaked at 316 Watts running Rainbow Six Siege at 1440P with the Kill-A-Watt power meter. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition reached 372 Watts, so this card uses considerably less power.

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. The Kill-A-Watt power meter that we used for the previous data has a polling rate of 1 second, whereas the PCAT has a polling rate of 0.1 seconds and also logs the data. This combined with the fact that it is only measuring the power used by the graphics card make it the superior way to look at power consumption. We recorded power usage on 3DMark Time Spy as this graphics test doesn’t often receive updates and is easy to run.

Here is a look at total PCIe Power for the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black against some other cards that we have recently tested. PCAT showed that during this snippet of time the GeForce RTX 3060 Black used at most 194.5 Watts of power with an average usage of 138.5 Watts. This is just a measurement of the card itself is using and nothing else in the system.

Here is a closer look at the total PCIe power over time of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Black plotted against the NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3060 Ti to give you an idea of how the two cards differ across the run.