AMD RX 580: With Great Performance Comes Great Power Consumption, 500W Plus Power Supply Recommended

It seems that the AMD RX 580 consumes much more power as compared to the RX 480. Here is what you need to know about the power draw.

The AMD RX 580 and RX 570 have just been released and they are refreshed versions of AMD RX 480 and RX 470. The difference is not only in the clock speeds but in the power consumption as well. The 500 series GPUs seem to need more juice as compared to the previous RX 400 series GPUs and it is advised that you use a 500 plus PSU in order to power these graphics cards.

There are loads of variants of the RX 580 and you can get the card in 8-pin, 8+6 pin and 8+8 pin configurations. This means that the GPU consumes much more power than the previous RX 480. Tests show that the RX 480 consumes 204W on average and 223W was the highest power draw that was recorded.

Changing the GPU in the system from the RX 480 to the AMD RX 580 and we saw a drastic increase in power consumption. The average recorded power consumption was 341W and the highest recorded power draw was 357W.

From what we see here, this is a lot of power drawn considering that the average recorded power draw for the Nvidia GTX 1080 was 259W and the most recorded power draw was 274. Taking things a step further, the GTX 1080 Ti draws 327W in average and 361W was the highest recorded power draw in the test. The following test bench was used in order to conduct these tests:

  • CPU: Intel I7 7700K 4.0GHz Turbo 4.5GHz
  • Motherboard: GIGABYTE AORUS Z270X Gaming 5
  • Cooler: Intel original fan
  • RAM: KINGSTON PREDATOR DDR4 2400 8GB X2

We can see that the AMD RX 580 consumes much more power as compared to the previous RX 480. Not only that but it also consumes more power than the GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1080. We know that the RX 580 is not even nearly as powerful as these GPUs from Nvidia so what is the reason behind such a huge power draw?

Let us know what you think about the AMD RX 580 and it’s power consumption. Would you consider buying one now that you know how much power it draws?

Sarmad is our Senior Editor, and is also one of the more refined and cultured among us. He's 25, a finance major, and having the time of his life writing about videogames.