NVidia 6 Series Power % Explaination

[F1aw1ess]

I've had a look round the forums and net but cant seem to get a concrete answer.

Hope someone could spend a minute explaining the Power % setting in afterburner please?

I have a 670 Windforce on driver 301.40 and use afterburner 2.2.1, I can change the voltage on the slider but it makes no difference, under load the card goes to 1.175v and at idle backs down to 0.987v

My default 2d clock seems to be 324 (was 51 on my 580, maybe not clocking down properly?) whereas I have a stable overclock of 1350mhz core and 7400ghz memory with a custom fan profile the card never goes over 60c.

Now, I have the afterburner graph running on my 3rd monitor so I can see it all the time when benching etc and although the card is clocking correctly up to 1350mhz like im telling it too the Power % averages around the 75% mark and peak up to around 95% once in a while.

I dont know whether this is good or bad or means I have further overclocking headroom etc etc.

I also found out that there is a setting in the options called Power Limit which can be increased past 100% but it doesnt seem to do anything, whether the bar is at 100% or max.

So I'm a bit confused and would hope someone will take a few minutes out of their day to help an old tired mind

Cheers guys

 

[Sin_Chase]

Power % is the % of the cards TDP that is being utilised to render your frames at any given time. It is dynamic, if the frames being rendered do not need the power then the card does not use it 'just because'

Conversely if the card DOES need the extra power it uses it. If you increase the Power limit upwards you are telling the card it can use more than 100% of it's TDP, up to 132% at the maximum.

It's not a fixed setting, it's merely a limit. Increasing it to 132% when the card only needs to use 75% of it's TDP to render the frames will do nothing. Basically you can set it to 132% and leave it there when adding an overclock +offset as that will ensure you are not being TDP limited at the frequencies you want to achieve.

There are quite a few videos on Youtube from review sites and the like which explain all this rather well.

As for headroom - The 6XX series is limited by the core voltage that, on reference cards, cannot be manually set or increased. Only non-reference add-in partner cards with custom VRM setups let you do that. Chances are your max overclock is dictated by how good of a clocker your card is. That is - how stable it is a higher frequencies within the reference board design voltage ranges.

 

[Havana_UK]

In addition to this (based on something I saw an nVidia rep demonstrate) if you set the power limited to 132% the card will clock higher under boost by default, because it's being allowed to use more power for a higher stable clock.

 

[F1aw1ess]

thanks for the reply.

surely though when benchmarking it should be requesting the maximum amount of power possible to render maximum frames but again this isnt what i see, it hovers around 70% peaking into the mid 90's

 

[F1aw1ess]

i only get the option up to 111% in afterburner?

 

[andybird123]

because you have a windforce, it's "100%" tdp is already much higher than a stock 670's, the software that manages the boost clock is not detecting enough load most of the time to require more than 70% of it's default TDP when on stock settings... I think a lot of these OC cards have been setup with TDP's in excess of what the actual chip can manage