With power reaching as high as 495.5 watts during hardware logging with this one test (3DMark Speed Way), the NITRO+ card is obviously making full use of those triple 8-pin PCIe power connectors (slot power did not exceed 60W). And while it only briefly flirted with 500 watts, during this test the card frequently pulled between 450W and 475W.
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference card already pulled more power than its rated TDP, but the Sapphire NITRO+ takes power draw with this 5mn GPU to the next level. Apparently Navi 31 doesn’t scale particularly well with power. We saw gains of 1% – 6% in the few tests presented above, but these obviously come at a high cost.
As to thermals, the card was exceptionally cool (and quiet) in operation. I’m talking load temps that barely touched 60 C, with hot spot temps not too far above this. In fact, during the highly unrealistic scenario of running Furmark for 15 minutes, the highest temps recorded were 73 C hot spot, with 61 C core. Now, this was a in a cool ~17 C room, but it’s still fantastic.
And no, before you ask, I didn’t test the card in different orientations. Just vertical on the test bench. And I sent it back already. Sorry.
