Power and Thermals
Asus adding extra TDP to the BIOS obviously increases total power consumption. That is reflected in under-load figures that are 44W higher than reference.
However, that massive Strix cooler does an admirable job of keeping RX Vega 64 cool and composed.
What's more, though we didn't test in our own environment, the card's fans kept very quiet under load. We'd describe the card as barely audible in a typical gaming rig, as is the GTX 1080 version, to be fair, and therefore a huge improvement over the noisy Radeon reference model.
A quick word on overclocking. We managed to run the Asus Radeon RX Vega 64 at 1,980MHz core and 1,000MHz memory, just beating out the clocks achieved by reference, and by doing so we added an additional 6.4 per cent performance in a trio of games. The downside of this voltage-induced performance is that power consumption rose to 532W at the wall.
