Power & Temperatures
Sticking with overclocks, we obviously wanted to see how far we could push things ourselves and with AMD, it works slightly differently in terms of increasing both the core clock and the memory clock to stable levels, until you see performance drop, and then lowering the voltage of the card to find a point of instability, and then claw it back a little to keep stability at the forefront.
To check stability, we run an hour-long loop of F1 24 to simulate what a typical gaming session would be like after prolonged usage. The GPU temperature at both stock and overclock were very strong, with only a margin of error 2 degrees between them at around 57 to 59 degrees, while the memory temperature was a little more on the warmer side at 83 degrees at stock and 90 degrees when overclocked.
The most striking thing that I noticed was the fan speed between the two runs with stock giving us some of the best noise levels we’ve had with the fans running at sub 1000 RPM, while overclocked showed that Sapphire have clearly pushed the card as hard as they can out of the factory without any detriment, as our overclock pushed the fan speeds in excess of 1700 RPM.
Power-wise, we also saw some changes with the stock clocks pulling around 315 Watts of power, while the overclock saw that rise, just beyond 360W.
