I have wattmeter plugged into wall constantly. With OCCT and Furmark running and stock settings whole computer only eats ~350 watts. With CPU overclocked to 4.1GHz at 1.4volts, PC uses 425 watts max. That PSU is never utilized fully and it runs at best slightly warm, so nothing is frying inside it. From what I read PSU electronics can survive maybe 60-85C and at least from innacurate and subjective impressions, it doesn't reach that. I remember I had non 80+ PSU, which is cheap and most likely 70% effective and looked like low end power supply, it got much hotter at full loads and spun fan much more.
During this time gap, I just tried to troubleshoot my wifi card and success, no more BSODs. What I did, was removed no longer needed drivers, with card unplugged. Then as Asus website says, let drivers to be downloaded by Windows. I just plugged in a cable. This worked beautifully. Even if power connector was plugged in correctly I replugged it again. At least for now, I have no Wattman settings reseted stuff.
I did some testing before all these problems with OCCT and Furmark (it makes my GPUs pull the most watts, so I think it's the most stressful test, but it causes pretty much any modern GPU to throttle down clock speeds). I will just write my results here in list (note: fan curves, except GPU and case fan setup was changed a lot during this time, so results aren't scientific):
FX 6300 + GTX 650 Ti (tested separately)
Furmark. Works at full speed temperature is in 70-80C limits. Without overclocking, maxes out at 75C.
OCCT. At stock works cold. Maximum temperature is at 45-46C.
Personal comment. At highly demanding tasks, rear exhaust exhausts slightly warm air, nothing to worry about. With 4.1GHz overclock at 1.3875V PC worked correctly and pretty much just as hot.
FX 6300 + RX 560 4GB (no 6 pin version from Gigabyte) (tested separately)
Furmark: GPU tries to stay at around 70-75C at all costs and revs up fan to 100-115%. Throttles to 920-970Mhz, even if it could just heat more. If I set power limit in MSI Afterburner to max, it pretty much never throttled. I was puzzled. Decided to investigate this nonsense in Unigine Heaven. I ran card with stock settings and with maxed out power limit. Difference in performance was 7%, but difference in clock speed was much greater. Due to this poor scaling, I decided that it's just some power saving crap, which increases efficiency meaningfully, at low cost of some performance. In games card ran at almost full speed too. I wasn't happy, but I understood it. Had thoughts about RMAing it. Felt stupid for not getting full RX 560 with 6 pin connector, because I thought that revision 2 is just fixed revision 1.
OCCT. Nothing has changed here as RX 560 isn't very hot card and roughly dumps just as much heat as GTX 650 Ti.
Personal impression. Exhausted air is slightly warm, nothing to worry about. For fun CPU was overclocked to 5.150 GHz at 1.55V and still heated up only to 59C in OCCT test, but was unstable. Never overclocked it that high again, as my motherboard is low end, doesn't have VRM heatsinks and CPU cooler is tower, so it doesn't blow air on VRMs. After experimentation case was modded and got 80 mm exhaust fan over VRM area, but as closer to rear as possible (to keep standard airflow model).
Wattage: Pretty low overall. Around 200-230 watts during gaming. At idle, it's 65-75 watts. During web page scrolling it's ~100 watts. During webpage load it's ~110 watts.
FX 6300 + RX 580 GB
Furmark. I expected to see throttling, but card acted differently. After 70-75C, it just drops the load, keeps low stock clock speed. Doesn't boost and also doesn't max out fans. Dunno how exactly, but it tried to keep itself less load. I suspect it changed clock speed itself, just didn't show it to me.
OCCT. No anomalies.
Furmark + OCCT. Once GPU gets hot, it dumps a lot of heat. CPU temperatures keep rising and stop at 69C. That's a lot and this Asrock board is annoying with stock settings as it keeps CPU at full load running at 3.2-3.5Ghz. That's just stupid design. Once I set clock speed to 3.5Ghz in UEFI, temperature reaches more than 72C and starts to throttle a lot. All way down to 2GHz without any shame. I tested out my 4.1Ghz overclock with 1.4V and yeah it heated up to 75C and started it's shameful act again. CPU cooler is seated properly, tightened well, paste was changed half year ago or something to Arctic MX-2. I decided to swap Scythe CPU fans to Noiseblockers and that proved to not be helpful. I also used Noctua resistors to slow down 2 case fans, even after their removal, CPU heated a lot. Even remounted case fan from intake to exhaust position, it didn't help.
Personal impressions (OCCT+Furmark). Exhausted air is hot, very hot. Case heats a lot. Warm spots are close to exhaust and on motherboard side of case, but after some time they even out a bit. After 1 hour of this testing, my whole room heated by several degrees. Air felt very dry. Being near computer caused my eyes to be very dry. I was sweating like it was 32C and summer. Soon I started feeling a bit dizzy, so I opened window to get some cold winter air. Gotta say that, I was extremely disappointed in RX 580 and thought about swapping it to GTX 1050 Ti. Radeon - The way it's meant to be cooked.
Wattage. Very high at all times. Around 250-300 watts during gaming. At idle, it's 75-100 watts. During web page scrolling, wattage is around 120 watts. Web page loading is at 130 watts. Furmark + OCCT makes it use 350 watts. Furmark + OCCT at 4.1GHz OC on CPU, makes PC use 420-425 watts. This is straight up horrible. My other PC with Athlon 845 and GTX 650 Ti, only uses 50-75 watts at idle, web page load - 70-80, during gaming - 100 and with stress tests running - ~120 watts. It's no surprise, that I don't like RX 580 and just used the other PC for daily usage. Power usage of my main is just too unreasonable and heat output is too bad.
Observation. After GTX 650 Ti was put in Fractal Design Define R4 in other PC, it ran 10C colder than it did in Cooler Master K280. It could be that Cooler Master case is just not great at cooling. That other PC doesn't even have CPU cooler like Mugen 4 PCGH. It only has Alpine 64 Plus. 4 fans are installed and they run at 7 volts. And fans are just something that came with case and my used Cooler master cheapo sleeve bearing fan and 800 rpm Scythe Slipstream. That system was pretty much just thrown in together without too much enthusiasm, hell it doesn't even have SSD or 8GB RAM, but runs much better than my main one.
Haven't tested stuff after fixing up my PC, but at least it works now. Voltages were always pretty normal, I haven't found any anomalies with them. Asrock motherboard doesn't have LLC (load line calibration), so it drops voltage during high CPU load. It can't correct that, but it doesn't need to correct it as everything works well.
Anyway, can someone here answer how AMD handled RX 480 PCIe power specification limit violations and how can RX 580 work at higher clock speeds, yet with pretty much the same power connections needed? What at worst could happen if those limits are exceeded?
