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Power draw
We use Nvidia PCAT to measure power draw of the graphics card only, with readings from both the PCIe slot and the PCIe power cables combined into a single figure. We use A Plague Tale: Requiem (4K/2160p) for this testing.
Somewhat staggeringly, power draw for the GameRock is even higher than I was expecting. On paper the card has a 575W TGP, and Palit has not increased the power limit. Despite that, we saw real-world power draw hitting just under 620W in A Plague Tale: Requiem, nearly a 50W increase over the Founders Edition.
Now, I know what you're thinking – with all the 12VHPWR drama going on, 620W does not sound like a good idea. Upon further analysis, we found that 13W was coming over the PCIe slot, meaning the cable itself was drawing roughly 607W at any given time. I also used a clamp meter to measure current over the six 12V wires, and load balancing was fine, ranging from 7.5A to 8.6A. Total current clocked just under 50A, which checks out considering the power draw on show.
That being said, there's clearly huge concerns around the 12VHPWR, or 12V-2X6, cable itself. Our cable and PSU behave properly, but Der8auer's recent findings suggest that behaviour can vary wildly, and dangerously so. Buildzoid pointed out that Nvidia removed two shunt resistors from the power delivery configuration, meaning the GPU isn't aware of how much power is coming from each individual wire, so if 50A was coming from just two wires, it would still chug merrily away.
Nvidia is yet to respond to these incidents, but it seems obvious to me that changes are needed. Making the power delivery worse than the RTX 3090 Ti, yet power draw hitting over 600W as we can see here, just seems like a very bad idea. Additionally, the lack of any real headroom – with the cable able to deliver 684W at max, so coming within just 11% of that figure here – seems like an equally bad idea when considering a good-quality single 8-pin could do 288W (at 24A), which is almost 50% safety headroom.
Performance per Watt
Combining the power draw values shown above with the performance data, we present performance per Watt for each graphics card tested:
In any case, that increase in power draw with basically no performance improvement to go alongside means overall efficiency has dropped compared to the FE and is now only on par with the RTX 4070.
