Power, Temperature and Noise
The downside to AMD's RX Vega architecture is higher-than-GeForce power consumption. The above graph shows system-wide power at the mains, and the Sapphire beast consumes over 100W in excess of a partner GeForce GTX 1080.
This is the figure for the out-of-the-box balanced mode. Activating 'turbo' increases it to 438W and going by our calculations, results in a negligible increase in performance that is not worth talking about.
Flicking it down to the second Bios position, which knocks a couple of per cent off the performance, further reduces consumption to 344W, which is still notably higher than a GeForce GTX 1080.
So it is just as well that Sapphire equips it with one of the most serious bits of air cooling we have ever seen, and the hunk of metal is able to keep the card at no more than 70°C under full load.
The fan speed hit about 1,200pm, but appreciating there are three, it is quiet but not practically silent. Given what Sapphire has to work with, its custom design is impressive in taming the RX Vega 64, and noise drops to 37.2dB for the alternate Bios.