Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 Limited Edition Idle and Load Temps:

When it comes to temperatures both of the cards we great despite the tiny heat sinks! We were seeing 27C idle with no fans spinning and 74C at load on the Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 Limited Edition graphics card. The fan speeds got up to 39% and that had the fans running at 1645 RPM and they were a bit noisy at that speed.

When it comes to GPU temperatures all three of the cards that we benchmarked today are right around 70C at load, so there isn’t a big difference at load. The Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 Limited Edition was the coolest at idle and all three cards had 0dB fans at idle that did not spin.

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

If there was one area to ding the Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition graphics card that would most certainly be in the noise department. With the fans running at 29% or ~1650 RPM they can certainly be heard over the water cooler and other system fans.