AMD Radeon RX 480 Graphics Card Review

Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures

Noise

In terms of noise output, the GPU’s blower cooler is relatively quiet in idle usage scenarios and I didn’t detect a huge volume increase compared to other graphics cards with custom coolers. Unfortunately, the fan speed ramps up substantially under load and it can become rather loud. While it’s not horrendously noisy, there is room for improvement.

Power Consumption

The RX 480 is extremely efficient and hardly consumes any power under full load. This makes it one of the most economically-friendly options available on the market today.

Temperatures

The fairly basic blower cooler isn’t great at thermal dissipation and often hovers around 90C under extreme load. Thankfully, the stock temperatures average out at 84C but it’s higher than I imagined given the more efficient manufacturing process. When overclocked, the core consistently hits 90C and really needs a custom cooling solution to maintain better temperatures. One might argue the core is designed to run at 90C in a similar vein to the 290X, but this is still up for discussion.