RX 7800 XT... But Power Efficient - Testing Games at 200 Watts

in my review that I posted a few days ago I said that the Radeon RX 7800 XT is a great GPU but the fact that it uses a lot more power than the RTX 4070 can become an issue for anyone that games a lot and pays a lot for electricity like we do here in the Netherlands for example now many of you don't have to worry about your electricity bill for one reason or another so this video might not be interesting to you but for some of us that can easily spend hundreds of dollars more over a couple of years just to power One graphics card instead of the other it might be very helpful so let's see what happens when we lower the power consumption of this RX 7800xt gaming OC from its default 286 watts to around 200 watts of power than an RTX 4070 uses so without further Ado let's begin right out of the box this card was pulling 286 wads on average in a GPU bottleneck game on a 1440p resolution that is about 90 Watts more than the RTX 4070 was using and as I said before a 90 watt difference can really add up depending on how much you game and how much you pay for electricity in your region so we're going to lower that power usage using amd's own software and the first setting that you typically want to look at is the GPU voltage option so this is a great starting point to play around with because very often it is even possible that if you bring that value a little bit down you can actually get a bit more performance while saving a couple of percent of power use but to get this card down to a much lower 200 Watts this setting is not going to be enough you need to reduce the power Target to the minimum which is 90 on this card and then find the right balance between the GPU core voltage and the maximum clock speed so you get the desired power draw but also as much performance as possible while remaining stable unfortunately I cannot just tell you what exact numbers you need to put in because at these settings will vary from car to card even if you buy the same gigabyte gaming OC model I used so the only way to do this is to take some time play with it a little bit and just try to figure out what setting works the best for you one very important thing to remember is that this is something you will have to do at your own risk I mean it is typically pretty safe to reduce the voltage of your GPU by a little bit but if you're not careful with these overclocking and undervolting settings you can absolutely cause major crashes or even damage your Hardware so do not go too aggressive right away and always change things a bit by bit and then see how that works before going further and if you're not really sure what you're doing you can also look up some in-depth guides on this subject because there are plenty of videos about that specifically after a bit of time we managed to get this card stable with a power draw of about 200 Watts it is now running at roughly 2220 megahertz a down from 2540 at stock settings so there is a big drop in clock speeds but it's now in the same power class as the RTX 4070. now let's see what this does to the gaming performance and I'm going to start with my favorite game of the year which is Baldur's Gate 3 and on 1440p and ultra settings the undervolt causes the average frame rate to drop a bit more than 10 percent and one percent lows to draw from just over 60 fps to just under 60 FPS but the overall experience isn't that different from a stock 7800 XT in Microsoft flight simulator we're seeing another relatively large drop about 13 which means that the 7800 XT went from being faster than an RTX 4070 to being slower than an RTX 4070 but again it's still competing pretty well the difference between the stock and the undervolted performance isn't always that large in Remnant 2 for example we're looking at about a four percent drop in frame rates and in God of War it is a very similar story with another loss of only four percent and if we look at the list of 11 different games most of the titles were somewhere in between those four results so if we consider the undervolted settings as the Baseline the original stock configuration is typically anywhere from four to thirteen percent faster with star field being the only exception at about a 19 difference and I really think these numbers ended up pretty impressive actually the stock settings use over 40 percent more power but it only manages to be about nine percent faster on average and nine percent isn't something we can just ignore but when your card runs this much more efficient it is a big Improvement in my opinion since the stock 7800 XT was a couple of percent faster than the 4070 comparing the undervolted 7800 XT results to the 4070 results becomes even more interesting so it is clear that some games just really favor Nvidia or really favor AMD so for anyone that is into one particular game it is always worth checking which card suits that particular title best but when you start looking at more and more games those differences do kind of even out so on average I have the undervolted RX 7800 XT one percent ahead of the RTX 4070 which means that these two are basically tied a big benefit of reducing power consumption is that your card can also run cooler and quieter and without manually adjusting anything fan curve related under bolting caused the fan speed to drop dramatically now before it wasn't super loud but you could definitely hear the fans run and with an Thunderbolt it was way quieter and barely audible at all the GPU core and memory temperatures were a little bit higher but the hot spot was several degrees lower which is probably what caused the car to reduce the fan speed still I would say this is a much better experience overall because the core and memory temperatures are still well within limits but you could also manually increase the fan speed if you want to lower these temperatures while keeping the card quieter than it was in stock settings and you can just you know play with this a little bit until you reach your preferred balance so an RX 7800 XD with a very aggressive undervolt can actually compete with the RTX 4070 when it comes to Raw performance as well as power efficiency which makes the RX 7800xt even more interesting than it was before because then it is just up to a simple decision of how much these cards cost in your region and if nvidia's stronger feature set is worth that possible price difference just remember that undervolting can really vary per card and you will most likely end up with slightly different results even if you get the same gaming OC model that I used for this video and you also have to remember that it takes a bit of time to set it up and it can involve some risks so if you're not comfortable with that that is completely fine but if you love to Tinker with your hardware and you'll love to play with settings so you can really sit down and tune the underworld to Perfection you will most likely see even better results than I did because this was a relatively quick job and it was already worth doing it so it is not for everyone but it does show that with some time and effort the 7800 XT can actually make sense in a high power cost country as well assuming AMD keeps their pricing reasonable this video was brought to you by Corsair and their Elite LCD XD coolers these Premium All-In-One water coolers combine excellent performance with a fully customizable LCD screen that can showcase anything you have in mind with a low noise pump and the AF Elite fans they can easily keep up with the latest and hottest of processors out there while keeping your system quiet you can install them on a variety of sockets including the latest Intel and AMD ones and once the installation is complete you can use the IQ software to control the RGB effects or sync them with the rest of your Corsair gear check them out using the links in the description below thank you for watching and for staying to the end of this video if you liked it please do consider 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Channel: Techtesters

Views: 45,248

Keywords: rx 7800 xt, rx 7800 xt undervolt, rx 7800 xt undervolting, undervolting rx 7800 xt, undervolting 7800 xt, undervolting amd radeon rx 7800 xt, undervolt 7800 xt, undervolt rx 7800 xt, undervolt amd radeon rx 7800 xt, undervolt amd gpu, undervolting amd gpu, undervolting amd graphics card, undervolt amd graphics card, rx 7800 xt gaming oc, amd, gigabyte, undervolt, undervolting, gpu power consumption, reduce pc power consumption, reduce pc power use, energy cost, techtesters

Id: 83Gz_A-luXI

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/LechHJ]

How does it compete with 4070 undervolt? Because right now it's basically as performant in raster as 4070 with same power budget and lose a lot in RT.