When the power supply suddenly switches off: Load peaks of graphics card and CPU measured together and counter-tested with power supplies | Basics & Practice | Page 4

Gaming loop in factory state

Let’s take it up a notch and now measure with a Radeon 6800 reference! Although the card offers higher gaming performance, the overall spikes are significantly lower! The average for all 12 volt ranges is now a little over 274 watts, amazing. Compared to the factory overclocked GeForce 3070, this is also due to the fact that it has already been beaten far beyond the sweet spot by the manufacturer, which also explains the lousy OC margin. Even the Pure Power 500 Watt and the Straight Power 550 Watt Platinum can cope with this load. So gaming with the RX 6800 reference is no hurdle, even with such a thick CPU.

The spikes in the overall graph as an extract from the 30-minute run will look like this:

Now let’s quickly look at the zoomed-out curves of an arbitrarily recorded 20-ms interval:

Gaming loop with overclocking

It will be significantly more again, but still everything remains within the framework. The 550 watt Straight Power Platinum still manages this task with flying colours, the Power Power 500 Watt switches off after a while. 300 watts on 12 volts are now on average on the bill, but the spikes are at an ample 580 watts. Even now, the graphics card hardly behaves worse than the RTX 3070 with OC. So the better input filtering of the Radeon RX 6800 pays off, especially since Power Tune’s actual switching remains more moderate than NVIDIA’s Boost.

The 2 minute excerpt from the 30 minute total loop shows that again, although again I didn’t get the nastiest spike here.

In addition, there is of course the zoom into one of these intervals:

Power supply test

	Gaming Loop Stock	Gaming Loop OC
Straight Power 550 Watt Platinum	ok	ok
Straight Power 650 Watt Gold	ok	ok
Pure Power 500 Watt Gold	ok	switched off
Pure Power 700 Watt Gold	ok	ok