AMD’s RX 7800 XT – currently our best graphics card of the moment – can be used with significantly less power consumption than the stock, without affecting performance to any great extent, it seems.
That’s the conclusion of Techtesters, a YouTube channel (from the Netherlands) that conducted tests on a Gigabyte RX 7800 XT Gaming OC graphics card (as highlighted by VideoCardz).
This Gaming OC graphics card has a standard power consumption of 286W as measured by Techtesters, but the YouTube channel has reduced that level to a much lower 202W.
This was done through a process known as undervolting, which, as the name suggests, literally involves diluting the voltage supplied to the card, allowing it to draw much less power.
With that reduction in most of the 100W power consumption, the resulting gaming benchmark results did drop – and of course they would – but many games didn’t run nearly as slowly as you might think.
Tech testers found that average performance dropped by about 9%, which is quite surprising considering that the change in power consumption is in a different ballpark (40%). In some games the difference is only 4% to 5%.
Analysis: Packing punches with the RTX 4070
Of course, we can’t forget that the RX 7800 XT is still 9% slower (on average for a number of PC games) than it would otherwise be, which isn’t an inestimable amount. But even with this big power drop, it’s still competitive with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 – and power consumption is indeed quite on par with the 4070 (which is only slightly under 200W at stock).
The undervolted RX 7800 XT trades effectively with the RTX 4070, being significantly faster in some games and a bit slower in others – the net result being a small win for AMD (1% faster on average).
Is it really worth it to reduce the power of an RX 7800 XT? Well, that’s very much a personal decision. Some people might hate the idea of losing anything in the way of smooth frame rates.
However, if you use your PC a lot and play a lot of games for a longer period of time, the decrease in energy consumption will mean a significant saving on your energy bill. And there are other benefits here too: the GPU runs cooler and quieter, which is always a good thing. There’s nothing worse than an unnecessarily noisy graphics card being a constant source of background irritation when using your PC.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a contemporary graphics card significantly underpowered without making a huge difference in performance, and in some ways it’s a measure of how hard modern GPU makers are running their products by default to get that extra boost piece of performance to be extracted.
In the case of the 7800 XT, AMD perhaps felt the need to ensure that comparisons to the previous generation 6800 XT GPU didn’t seem too excessive – as there was some disappointment around that particular aspect of the new RDNA 3 offering’s frame rates , Certainly.