Power, Sound & Temperature Benchmarks
Power Consumption
We begin by comparing the power consumption of each card in our gaming loop, stress test, and at idle. Depending on the power targets specified by each manufacturer, we sometimes measured substantial differences. We're ignoring the decimal places in our bar graphs, since those values are too small and would be within measurement tolerances.
We also found that some cards with lower power targets started to throttle during our stress test, resulting in lower power consumption numbers. This did not, however, have a negative impact on general gaming performance for any of the tested cards, as the stress test merely represents a worst-case scenario.
Sound
In the following comparison, we summarize the maximum results in our gaming loop as a bar graph - check out the frequency spectrum on the individual product pages, too.
Since these cards employ a semi-passive mode, their fans don't spin at idle. Consequently, there was no reason to collect measurements in that state.
Temperature
In two galleries we compare temperatures on the open test bench and inside a closed case. We start with measurements from the GPU:
The VRMs are just as important as the GPU since they play an even more active role in heating the PCB. Again, you'll find more detail on the individual products pages.
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Was the latest driver used? Was the BIOS updated in every card?
The newest generation AMD cards (Polaris) are apparently designed to handle heavy Tessellation better than previous gens, so my guess is that would be the circumstances in which the RX480 beats the Fury. I would say it was the extra 4GB of frame buffer space, but we've seen that the HBM often negates that RAM shortage in many benchmarks.