For our power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing, we use Powenetics testing hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus — this time at 1080p medium instead of our normal 1440p ultra, due to the underpowered GPU. We also test with the FurMark stress test at 1600x900. Our power testing PC uses an open testbed, as that's required for all the extra wires and riser card, and it's the same Core i9-9900K that we've used for the past several years.
Metro Exodus appears to have taxed the GTX 1630 in such a way as to limit maximum power draw to 55W or less. Some games will push higher power use, particularly at more reasonable settings (for example, Horizon Zero Dawn at its original quality setting broke the 60W mark). FurMark meanwhile was able to max out the card's power use at a steady 72–73W.
There's certainly room for overclocking, but the GPU and memory on the GTX 1630 will fall well short of the speeds that would be necessary to make it a worthwhile purchase. Again, GTX 1650 Super doubles all the important elements and currently costs the same $199 — less if you buy it used. An extra 100 MHz and 14 Gbps VRAM won't come anywhere near closing that gap.
Clock speeds on the GTX 1630 were in line with what we're used to seeing from Turing GPUs: about 100 MHz higher than the rated boost clock for gaming, and even FurMark beat Colorful's stated 1815MHz boost clock.
Temperatures peaked at around 67C in FurMark, while Metro only averaged 57C. Again, some games and settings will push the GTX 1630 a bit harder, but we've used the same test for consistency. Fan speeds also topped out at around 1800 RPM in FurMark, while lighter workloads dropped the fans below 1500 RPM.
We measured noise levels at 10cm using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter, aimed between two two fans. That helps to minimize the impact of the CPU cooling fans, and the noise floor (with the CPU fans running) of our test environment and equipment was <33 dB(A). Colorful's GTX 1630 does not have a 0db mode for the fans, so they're always spinning, and the idle noise was a bit higher at 35.0 dB(A). During our gaming tests, that increased to 39.9 dB(A) and 42% fan speed. Manually setting the fans to 75% resulted in 54.3 dB(A) of noise, though it's unlikely the card would hit such speeds during normal use.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
