Power-hungry RX 7900 XTX showcases drastically reduced idle consumption of just 20 W with VRR enabled

It is not a secret that AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and the RX 7900 XTX GPUs consume significantly more power than their NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 counterparts while gaming. The cards were also reported to have jacked up power usage when idling while connected to external displays. Interestingly, ComputerBase has found out that the RX 7900 XT and the RX 7900 XTX exhibit much improved idle power consumption if Adaptive Sync is activated. The trick works even if Variable Refresh Rate is disabled through Windows settings.

Explaining the curious result, ComputerBase reports that the new idle power consumption figures were measured while the publication was re-doing gaming power draw tests using the new Powernetics V2. While connected to a 4K 144 Hz VRR monitor, AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs showed a remarkable reduction in power consumption when the AMD Adaptive Sync was turned on. Where the RX 7900 XTX consumed 104 W with Adaptive Sync off, the card only needed 20 W. Similarly, the RX 7900 XT also showed a surprisingly reduced consumption of only 17 W. This behavior also translated to dual monitors with VRR support.

Interestingly enough, RDNA 2 GPUs like the RX 6700 XT also exhibited the same pattern, as ComputerBase mentions the board only consumed 8 W at idle vs 34 W under the aforementioned conditions.

Unfortunately, ComputerBase is unable to provide any reasons as to why power consumption would drop when VRR is enabled. The publication reached out to AMD but has yet to get a response.

Put simply, if you are rocking an RDNA 3/2 GPU with a high refresh rate VRR display, it could be worthwhile turning Adaptive Sync on as it can potentially reduce power consumption by quite significant margins.

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