But when we are talking about the Graphics Cards (RX 590 vs GTX 1060) as gamers, the 100W more power is not that important because most of the time the user is focusing on the performance of the card. There are people that may chose the lower power card but the vast majority will/should not be concerned about the power usage especially when the more power hungry card is also faster and comes with a game bundle.
I beg to disagree: those 100W extra watts are not just a few nickels and dimes in extra electricity cost, they also come with extra heat in the case and more importantly a more costly cooling solution. (both for the build in question, and more importantly for the card itself)
A better balanced card that doesn't require fat coolers is a far more sensible proposition even if it means loosing 5-10% performance, and especially considering such a card comes with some overclocking headroom. When it comes to pricing, the RX 590 needs to breathe in the neck of RX 580 in order for the power/performance compromise to make sense.
Here's how all this translated in real world problems, as reported by TomsHardware in their
RX 590 Fatboy review:
The 245W we measure during FurMark is ultimately only constrained by XFX’s power limit and the cooler’s inability to keep up. Spikes as high as 300W are downright unbecoming of a mainstream graphics card.
So the card consumes ~240W in games and ~245W under torture, and is mainly limited by the cooler's inability to take it further. This means overclocking on the RX 590 is mostly a no go, which further erodes it's value proposition compared to RX 580 and GTX 1060. We might be able to get some breathing space by undervolting and overclocking, but I won't hold my breath for a meaningful jump in performance.
For the power consumption we measured, XFX’s cooler really does seem to be a limiting factor. Something larger (and quieter) would have certainly helped. To be sure, a constant 1580 MHz is only possible in a really well-ventilated case.
The card only maintained 1527Mhz boost clock while running inside a closed case.
So maybe the fans should run faster:
Faced with a real-world gaming workload, the fans gradually ramp up over 15 minutes to just under 2000 RPM, maintaining a temperature just over 80 degrees Celsius. They don’t need to spin nearly as fast in an open case, where temperatures level off around 79 degrees.
There are no reserves to adjust the fans down a bit. Rather, you may feel compelled to turn them up for more cooling. Unfortunately, noise becomes an issue not long after.
Maybe the XFX card isn't the best example to showcase the best side of the RX 590, but it certainly does the job in highlighting what pushing the chip to it's limits will do to secondary objectives such as noise, overclocking and required case cooling.
PS: Imagine Nvidia came up with a leaky GTX 1060Ti that ran 10% faster than RX 590 for the same price, while using 280W. Would that card make sense to gamers?