Clock Speeds

For this test, we first let the card sit in idle to reach thermal equilibrium. Next, we start a constant 100% gaming load, recording several important parameters while the test is running. This shows you the thermal behavior of the card and how the fans ramp up as temperatures increase. Once temperatures are stable (no increase for two minutes), we stop the load and record how the card cools down over time.



We also ran the same test for the quiet BIOS:


Looks like there's still a bunch of driver issues with monitoring. GPU voltage and GPU clock would drop exactly to zero when idle, which seems unlikely to be correct, too.

Voltage-Frequency Analysis

The card will dynamically adjust clock and voltage based on render load, temperature, and other factors.

For the graph below, we recorded all GPU clock and GPU voltage combinations of our 1920x1080 resolution benchmarking suite. The plotted points are transparent, which allows them to add up to indicate more often used values. A light color means the clock/voltage combination is rarely used and a dark color means it's active more often.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.

The following table lists the clock settings for important performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that is used in those states.


As mentioned above, some sensor readings in the AMD driver simply come back as zero when the card is idle.