To support very high QAM rates, a user equipment (UE) needs extremely good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Using a receiver configuration that improves SNR comes at the expense of higher power consumption. However, consuming higher power to support very high QAM rates when poor channel conditions are present is a waste of power. By correlating the modulation and coding scheme used by the UE with the UE channel quality estimate, the UE can modify the receiver configuration to improve SNR only when channel conditions support very high QAM rates.