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Undervolting GPU should be standard procedure

ne0

ne0

ne0

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2 Feb 2018
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I can't believe I've never tried this before but I finally got round to properly understanding how to undervolt a gpu and now I feel stupid for never doing this before.

I have a case which is not very good when it comes to airflow and a pretty small room which gets really uncomfortably hot with my gpu mostly sitting at 79 to 81c with the window wide open.

The clock speed would always end up fluctuating due to the temperature and the temps, whilst not dangerous or anything, always bothered me, plus it just got too hot in here!

After undervolting to .850mv my gpu never goes above 65c and I've even seen it as low as 59c which to me is just incredible compared to what I'm used to. That's with the gpu now pegged at its boost clock of 1875mhz with no movement ever.

If anyone else has thought about trying this then I'd say don't hesitate, it's essential imo. Hope this helps someone else!
 
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Yep. Surprised more people don't do it.
And if you do it right, you lose very very little performance if any. And a moderate undervolt can actually yield higher sustained clocks and better performance compared to running at stock or even certain overclocks. All whilst using significantly less power and therefore producing way less heat.

I've been doing it for years! (doing on a 3090FE now)
 
Yeah, I've been doing it with all my cards for a few years now. You can often get better performance than stock with a moderate undervolt and barely lose any performance even with a major one. Ampere cards will generally operate around the 2GHz range at 950mV and the 1900MHz range at 887mV. Even with a maximum overclock pushing everything to the limit you're not getting too much higher than the former without an exceptional card.
 
My best synthetic scores have come from a modified undervolt curve as oppose to a straight up OC. Currently running @ 9.25mv everything I've tested apart from CP2077 works fine.
 
ne0 said:
I can't believe I've never tried this before but I finally got round to properly understanding how to undervolt a gpu and now I feel stupid for never doing this before.

I have a case which is not very good when it comes to airflow and a pretty small room which gets really uncomfortably hot with my gpu mostly sitting at 79 to 81c with the window wide open.

The clock speed would always end up fluctuating due to the temperature and the temps, whilst not dangerous or anything, always bothered me, plus it just got too hot in here!

After undervolting to .850mv my gpu never goes above 65c and I've even seen it as low as 59c which to me is just incredible compared to what I'm used to. That's with the gpu now pegged at its boost clock of 1875mhz with no movement ever.

If anyone else has thought about trying this then I'd say don't hesitate, it's essential imo. Hope this helps someone else!
Click to expand...


Yeah comes down to cooling

if temps aren't good then undervolting can in cases result in better performance.

higher voltages will provide better absolute performance however you must have cooling to support it. No one sets performance world records with undervolts.

GPUs are generally slightly overvolted from factory to reduce RMAs by improving stability. Just cause you can undervolt and be stable doesn't mean the next GPU will be able to do the same.


I belive overclocking and undervolting tools should be in graphics card control panel software
 
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Grim5 said:
Yeah comes down to cooling

if temps aren't good then undervolting can in cases result in better performance.

higher voltages will provide better absolute performance however you must have cooling to support it. No one sets performance world records with undervolts.

GPUs are generally slightly overvolted from factory to reduce RMAs by improving stability. Just cause you can undervolt and be stable doesn't mean the next GPU will be able to do the same.


I belive overclocking and undervolting tools should be in graphics card control panel software
Click to expand...

i'm not hitting thermal limits when I push my card, i'm hitting voltage limits.. or silicone limits.
 
Grim5 said:
Yeah comes down to cooling

if temps aren't good then undervolting can in cases result in better performance.

higher voltages will provide better absolute performance however you must have cooling to support it. No one sets performance world records with undervolts.
Click to expand...

I think it's more complex than that because there's another factor to take into account - power draw.

I discovered the potential of undervolting with the Radeon 7950 I had some years ago. I got a very large increase in performance at the same clocks by undervolting. Temps and noise were reduced, but that wasn't what caused the increase in performance. Monitoring showed that the card was power throttling, not thermal throttling. The card was overvolted out of the box, by a surprising amount. IIRC (it was a while back - my memory isn't certain) I was able to drop it by ~200mV.

My current card (a 1070 Ti) is still limited by power draw despite apparently being undervolted out of the box (max GPU voltage is 90mV lower than the spec for that GPU). Even when I increased the power limit by 30%, it was still limited by power draw. I tried undervolting it further, but it was unstable with lower voltage. Maybe I could shave a few mV off, but that's neither here nor there. I run the card at stock everything anyway - any fiddling with settings is purely temporary for benchmarking as a sport.
 
I undervolted my 3080 to a "sweet spot" in a recently posted video on these forums and it crashed during heaven Benchmark.

I then returned it back to stock settings and that's the end of my undervolting experience.
 
Cadder said:
I undervolted my 3080 to a "sweet spot" in a recently posted video on these forums and it crashed during heaven Benchmark.

I then returned it back to stock settings and that's the end of my undervolting experience.
Click to expand...

Like any fiddling with stuff, YMMV. Stock settings are guaranteed to work. Anything else isn't. I think undervolting is always worth a try, though. I don't think it's possible to damage a graphics card by undervolting, although I might be wrong about that. I'm an amateur mild tinkerer, not an expert.
 
I completely agree!

I've had a few gpu's now where the TDP is the limiting factor in the cards capabilities, but by limiting the voltage at that same frequency could easily drop the power usage by upwards of 15%.
 
Undervolting and overclocking has been available in Radeon Software going back as far as I can remember. It’s just a standard feature now.

I’ve undervolted every single GPU I’ve had. The sapphire 6900 XT Toxic Extreme is the first GPU I’ve had that I run overclocked for the most part, due to the possibility to add 400 MHz onto the stock core clock for only a modest increase in power draw (less than 100W).
Due to the cooler being silent and keeping temps in the 50/60 range, undervolting does not hold the same value it has with previous GPUs for once. However for most GPUs, particularly ones with high power draw at stock, it’s a must.
 
OP is right! Just started fiddling with it onmmy 6800XT for the first time. My previous best TS gfx score was 19820 just using higher clocks, increased power and mem OC. Undervolting by 50mv increased that to 20081 (average clocks only improved by 2Mhz to 2432), then when going down to 1v the average clocks jumped to 2482MHz and the score to 20342!
 
Cyber-Mav said:
So its unstable due to undervolt?
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Yes but only CP2077 causes any issues.. running full RT and DLSS so guessing it just needs a bit more juice when all cores a working at full whack. I've been advised that CP can be finicky with mem OC's aswell so +1000 mem might be not be helping.
 
now that nvidia fans seem to want to undervolt it probably will become standard. most AMD users have undervolted for a good 5 years plus.
 
D1craig said:
now that nvidia fans seem to want to undervolt it probably will become standard. most AMD users have undervolted for a good 5 years plus.
Click to expand...

Did you mean anything by describing nvidia's customers as "fans" and AMD's customers as "users"?
Or are you putting forward the argument that AMD's kit has traditionally been less efficient thus making undervolting more appealing?
Or that manufacturers have been routinely setting up their AMD-based cards with higher than necessary voltage out the box?
 
I've been undervolting for over 10 years. Everything undervolts, CPU, GPU, chipset, RAM. It's quite amazing how much heat you can reduce. I also have the theory that you will extend life of components.

It's even possible to overclock and undervolt at the same time!

The success of undervolting depends on the quality of your PSU.
 
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Undervolting nvidia cards seems to be decent, get a nice reduction on powerdraw and temps with better then stock performance, amd cards on the other hand, I own a 6600xt and an undervolt did nothing, Im not sure if its because its already really efficient or if I have just done it wrong but I was expecting similar results to the nvidia cards.
 
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