Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.

For this, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and AIDA64. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC averaged 222.85 watts across the peak wattages on our tests. That put it in below the RTX 4070 and ahead of the RX 7600. It’s also a huge improvement over the RX 6750 XT which it has performed similarly with in a lot of tests. The 6750 XT averaged 110 more watts, that’s a huge improvement. The highest result for the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was 238.49 watts and overall all of the results are surprisingly close with just Time Spy Extreme and Speed Way being higher than the rest.

With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC did 31.61 points per watt putting it below the RTX 4070 and just ahead of the RX 7900 XTX on this efficiency ranking. The RX on the other hand is down at the bottom of the chart at just 17.7 points per watt.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC is in the top half of the chart for the 50% noise result at 40.8 dB. At 100% fan speed, however, it drops down to the bottom of the chart with 53.6 dB. This is interesting because the RPM chart shows us that the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was running closer to the middle of the pack in fan speed. Having just two fans does help, but I don’t know why it was noisier at 50% fan speed.

I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC didn’t do too bad at just 35.4 dB sitting in the bottom ¼ of the chart. The fan speed under load chart does help paint the picture of why, however, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC was running at just 31% fan speed when under load.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC’s temperatures leveled off at 63c putting it right in the middle of the chart. The memory temperatures were in the middle of the pack as well at 70c. Cranking the fans up to 100% the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC dropped down to 54c making it a delta of 9c between the stock fan profile and 100% fan speed. The memory temps dropped similarly down to 56c. That delta is a little on the low side but also helps paint a bigger picture as the stock fan profile was only running at 31% fan speed. The horizontal heatsink layout did well with the stock profile but there is less headroom than you might see in some other coolers.

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, like most cards with a blow-through second fan, runs significantly cooler on the right fan side than on the left. There is some heat near the center of the left fan but overall the fan side is running very cool. Up on the top edge, we can see where all of that heat is being directed with the hot spot being the exposed PCB at the center of the card. Then on the back, we see some of the same temperature differential that we saw with the fan side but the metal backplate has absorbed some of the heat here, especially when you get closer to the center of the card behind the GPU where it gets up to 56c.