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Power Consumption
Power Consumption at Different Loads
We measured about 261W during our gaming loop using the driver's Balanced power profile. That's about 20W less than AMD's reference model using its default BIOS. Color us astonished. The BIOS modifications, including AMD's new power table, should work really well once they're made available more broadly. Given identical frequencies, this card's power consumption is very similar to what we measured from Gigabyte's lower-end Radeon RX Vega 56 Gaming OC. Not bad from a Vega 64-class board.
Switching into manual overclocking mode with a 50%-higher power limit pushes us beyond 330W, at which point the thermal solution is overloaded (unless you really crank the fans up). As a result, we decided not to get any more aggressive with our overclocking. Rather, we stuck with the driver's Balanced power profile for testing.
The corresponding voltages for our gaming loop and stress test at Gigabyte's stock settings are plotted in the following graph:
Load On The Motherboard Slot
At a peak of 2.4A through our stress test, Gigabyte's Radeon RX Vega 64 Gaming OC 8G falls significantly below the 5.5A ceiling defined by the PCI-SIG for a motherboard's 12V rail. A mere 1.9A during the gaming loop is even more conservative. Overall, balancing is well-implemented, and the motherboard slot hardly ever experiences serious loads.
Power Consumption In Detail
The graphs below plot detailed power consumption and current readings in order to illustrate our findings.
Naturally, peaks in power consumption are highest during gaming. But spikes of up to 340W are still acceptable, since they're far too brief to cause a problem.
The same goes for the corresponding current measurements:
During our stress test, the short-term peaks are significantly less pronounced (even if the power consumption is slightly higher than during gaming workloads).
Again, our current readings follow the graph rather closely and show no abnormalities.
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