Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
[Card Image]
All our gaming tests are conducted using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, which allows us to capture total graphics card power, GPU clocks, GPU temperatures, and some other data as we run each gaming benchmark. We have separate 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for each area, which we'll order from highest to lowest resolution for these tests.
AMD officially rates the RX 9060 XT 16GB card as having a 160W TBP (Total Board Power), and the PowerColor Reaper card pretty much nails that figure. It’s actually fractionally above that mark, with 163W at 1080p, and 164W at 1440p and 4K.
Nvidia’s GPUs, in contrast, have different power ratings. The RTX 5060, for example, has a 145W TGB (Total Graphics Power), while the RTX 5060 Ti has a 180W TGP. All three 5060-class Nvidia GPUs come in well below their respective TGP ratings.
Clock speeds among the different GPUs and architectures aren't super important, but it's still interesting to see where things land. The PowerColor card does have a slight overclock relative to AMD’s reference specifications, but the Game Clock and Boost Clock discrepancies muddy the waters.
The 9060 XT never quite hits the maximum boost clock, but it’s also well above the supposed 2620 MHz Game Clock. Average clocks decrease as we increase the settings as well, so 1080p manages 3090 MHz while 1080p ultra drops that to 3050 MHz, and then the GPU drops below 3000 MHz at 1440p, and 4K hits 2900 MHz. Compared to Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti GPUs, that’s anywhere from a 350 MHz advantage to a 120 MHz advantage.
Like the clock speeds, comparing GPU temperatures without considering other aspects of the cards doesn't make much sense. One card might run its fans at higher RPMs, generating more noise while being "cooler." So these graphs should be used alongside the noise and performance results. The PowerColor card consistently lands at about 70C, give or take 1C. While that’s not a “hot” card by any stretch, it’s generally running warmer than the RTX 5060 Ti cards. The closest Nvidia gets is with the 5060 Ti 16GB at 4K, where it’s only 1C cooler than the 9060 XT. But we also need to look at noise levels.
We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the right fan for two fans. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources, like the fans on the CPU cooler. The new noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 34 dB(A), due to the noise from the CPU cooling pump. The PowerColor card generally does a good job at staying quiet. The larger triple-fan cards can beat it, but it comes in slightly below the noise level of the Asus RTX 5060 Dual, the PNY 5060 Ti 16GB, and the relatively poorly performing Gigabyte RTX 5060 Ti 8GB.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content