Credit: Brad Chacos/IDG
Power draw, thermals, and noise
We test power draw by looping the F1 2020 benchmark at 4K for about 20 minutes after we’ve benchmarked everything else and noting the highest reading on our Watts Up Pro meter, which measures the power consumption of our entire test system. The initial part of the race, where all competing cars are onscreen simultaneously, tends to be the most demanding portion.
This isn’t a worst-case test; we removed the Core i7 8700K’s overclock and specifically chose a GPU-bound game running at a GPU-bound resolution to gauge performance when the graphics card is sweating hard. If you’re playing a game that also hammers the CPU, you could see higher overall system power draws. Consider yourself warned.
Brad Chacos/IDGThe Sapphire Nitro+’s boosted clock speeds and power limit result in a higher power draw than the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT, as you’d expect. It’s on a par with the similarly overclocked XFX Merc 319 and the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, and it draws about 40W less than overclocked custom RTX 3080s like the MSI Gaming X Trio and EVGA FTW3 Ultra.
We test thermals by leaving GPU-Z open during the F1 2020 power draw test, noting the highest maximum temperature at the end.
Brad Chacos/IDGCooling performance is solid, but not spectacular, with GPU temperatures falling in line with all the graphics cards we’ve tested in this enthusiast-class segment thus far.
It’s not shown on this graph, but Sapphire’s tweaks help the Nitro+ keep the overall GPU package much cooler than the reference design. All graphics cards report a core GPU temperature, and that’s what we report here. But RDNA-based Radeon graphics cards come with significantly more sensors embedded throughout. AMD uses the hottest spot of any of those to adjust clock speeds as needed—a metric reported as the “GPU junction temperature.” This hotspot is significantly cooler in Sapphire’s graphics card. While the reference AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT hits a 103-degree Celsius hotspot temp, the Nitro+ tops out at 96 degrees Celsius. (The XFX Merc 319 hit 93 degrees Celsius.)
Brad Chacos/IDG
You can see the wave-shaped heatsink under the Nitro+’s swooping fans.
Let’s talk about noise for a second, too. Sapphire ships the Nitro+ with the Performance BIOS enabled by default. That raises clock and fan speeds to improve gaming frame rates at the expense of higher noise levels. With the Performance BIOS, the Nitro+ remains comfortably quiet, but no quieter than AMD’s hugely improved reference design. As you can see in our gaming benchmarks, however, even the Performance BIOS doesn’t get you much extra oomph in raw frame rates.
We highly recommend flipping over to the Quiet BIOS instead. It’s noticeably quieter than the stock setting. Some quick benchmarks revealed you lose a negligible amount of performance even with the lower clocks and fan speeds. It’s a better user experience overall.
With the Quiet BIOS enabled, the Nitro+ doesn’t quite match the XFX Merc 319’s inaudible running, but its fan noise is very faint, and XFX’s graphics card is one of the most massive we’ve ever tested. It’s interesting how XFX and Sapphire differed in their BIOS preferences, too. Both offer the exact same speeds on their two BIOS switches, but XFX defaults to the quieter BIOS, while Sapphire opts to push frame rates. The names differ despite the identical behaviors too. Sapphire calls its slower BIOS “Quiet” and defaults to the faster “Performance” BIOS; XFX calls its default slower BIOS “Balanced,” and you can flip over to the faster “Rage” profile.
Next page: Should you buy the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 6800 XT?
