XFX Speedster MERC319 Radeon RX 6800 XT Review

Temperature & Power Consumption

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.

The XFX Speedster MERC319 Radeon RX 6800XT with reference card is longer, taller and wider than the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reference card as you can see in the image above. This should translate into better thermals, so let’s take a quick look at them using the sensors tab in GPU-Z.

XFX MERC319 Radeon RX 6800 XT Temperatures:

We tested the cards with their default settings and found the AMD Radeon RX 6800 had an idle temperature of 30C (33C hotspot) after gaming for 30 minutes we reached 72C (92C hotspot). The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reference card was 32C (35C hotspot) at idle and 74C (91C hotspot) at gaming load. No fans spun at idle and the noise level on the XFX MERC319 6800 XT was not a concern as it ran very quiet while gaming.

Notice that we were hitting over 2.5GHz on the GPU clock with the card in RAGE mode.

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For load numbers we ran Rainbow Six Siege at 1440P and recorded the peak power number while the in-game benchmark was running. This is done to ensure the results are repeatable.

Power consumption on the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reference card topped out at 491 Watts and the XFX Speedster MERC319 Radeon RX 6800XT hit 536 Watts on this game title. This increase of 45 Watts was expected as we are running the card in hardware RAGE mode (BIOS Switch) and we have RAGE mode enabled in the AMD software. This means that the card is using more power than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 that it matches up to compete with.

NVIDIA PCAT Testing

One of the new tools that we have to look at power consumption is the NVIDIA Power Capture Analysis Tool (PCAT). NVIDIA came up with custom designed board and software utility that captures accurate perf-per-watt and total graphics board performance data.

Here is a look at total PCIe Power for the XFX MERC319 6800 XT against some GeForce RTX 3070/3080 Founders Edition graphics cards and the AMD Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT reference cards. The XFX MERC319 was run in RAGE mode, but all of the cards were running at stock settings and we recorded the power on a standard run of 3DMark Time Spy.

Here you can see the XFX MERC319 Radeon RX 6800 XT peaks at 426.3 Watts of power and this is a measurement of just what the card itself is using and nothing else in the system. So, we are pulling over 62 Watts more power at peak usage than on the reference card to run the MERC319 at these settings.

Let’s wrap this up!