Radeon RX 590 in review - Polaris at the absolute limit | Page 15

The transition to an improved manufacturing process (12nm FinFET) is also intended to breathe new life into Polaris before retirement. However, with regard to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060, the goal has been to use the newly acquired reserves exclusively for clock increases and not to increase efficiency with the same performance, which is a pity from our point of view. XFX also relies on existing technology of the current RX 580 GTS Black Edition for the RX 590 Fatboy tested today, saving the costs for a new development of the board and radiator. We tested more closely...

Power consumption and loads

The power consumption of this board partner card is almost 238 watts in the gaming loop almost at Vega56 level, which unfortunately supports the crowbar theory mentioned above. The 245 watts in the Torture loop are ultimately limited only by the set power limit and the cooler including thermal limits, because with a nasty manual intervention you end up at almost 300 watts, if you only put it on it. But that is already quite pointless.

The voltages are in the expected range with an average of 1.18 volts for the gaming loop, which also remains relatively constant as long as the card is not thermally limited. But more on that later.

The load distribution on the rails is consistently very good, because the maximum 5.5 amperes of the motherboard slot are never even reached or even exceeded. If you remember the first Polaris cards, this is a clear case of learning by doing, as you have honestly faced the actual power consumption.

Detailed recording of power consumption and flowing currents

As usual, I now also set aside the power consumption and the flowing currents as detailed graphics of my oscillograph measurements. A service that hardly anyone else offers and which shows how the maps "tick" in detail: