Asus GTX 980ti strix undervolting

[Lawliet93]

Hi there. 

I recently purchased a GTX 980ti strix from Asus for 320 euros. The price aside, I was not happy with the card. I had to change the thermal paste on it (the factory one was crap from the get go). The card produces a lot of heat, which is mostly due to its high core voltage (1.187V). I believe that this is to much as at that voltage I can hit a boost clock of 1435MHz, which I don't need as I am gaming at 1080p. I would like to settle for a core clock of 1,25-1,3GHz and reduce the core voltage to let's say 1,1V. The problem is, I can't reduce the voltage bellow 1,187V in any overclocking tool. I imagine, I will have to flash a new bios, which is not a problem for me so... Guys would you please give a some alternatives regarding this topic, or even some guides, hell even your personal experiences would be nice. 

[Energycore]

You can't reduce load voltage on Maxwell cards.

 

However you can reduce the power or temperature target and that will effectively throttle the card to meet the parameters you give it.

 

Also if you're on 1080p 60Hz, you should cap the framerate at 60 (you can do it with MSI Afterburner's bundled RivaTuner Statistic Server), even if you don't use vsync and that'll lower GPU utilization, which also lowers heat output.

 

I hope these two tricks are useful

[Lawliet93]

4 hours ago, Energycore said:

You can't reduce load voltage on Maxwell cards.

 

However you can reduce the power or temperature target and that will effectively throttle the card to meet the parameters you give it.

 

Also if you're on 1080p 60Hz, you should cap the framerate at 60 (you can do it with MSI Afterburner's bundled RivaTuner Statistic Server), even if you don't use vsync and that'll lower GPU utilization, which also lowers heat output.

 

I hope these two tricks are useful

Well, it's not the best. I hate that GPU boost technology, you can't make it behave. Reducing the power limit actually increases voltage in my case (because the GPU tries to maintain the core clock). I hate those clock fluctuations. Well.. You can set in on Pascal and that's basically maxwell on a 16nm process. 

[Khamul]

What is a lot of heat for you?

[Khamul]

By the way, you can just use MSI afterburner and in power limit instead of 100% select 70% or lower. Which is absolute nonsense in my opinion but you can do it..

[Lawliet93]

11 hours ago, Khamul said:

By the way, you can just use MSI afterburner and in power limit instead of 100% select 70% or lower. Which is absolute nonsense in my opinion but you can do it..

Yeah, doing that is stupid, because, you either lose some core clock or it will increase the voltage to compensate for the lack of powaaa. Well, I might flash the BIOS or use maxwell bios tweaker. (I am happy wih 1,2GHz at the lowest voltage possible). On the other hand... you can undervolt any AMD GPU and you don´t have to deal with some driver crap I had to today.

[Energycore]

13 hours ago, Lawliet93 said:

Well, it's not the best. I hate that GPU boost technology, you can't make it behave. Reducing the power limit actually increases voltage in my case (because the GPU tries to maintain the core clock). I hate those clock fluctuations. Well.. You can set in on Pascal and that's basically maxwell on a 16nm process. 

If reducing the power limit increases voltage that's bad lol.

 

You should play with the temperature target. Set it at say, 75C or similar.

 

Did you cap framerate and did that help?

[faziten]

5 hours ago, Lawliet93 said:

Yeah, doing that is stupid, because, you either lose some core clock or it will increase the voltage to compensate for the lack of powaaa. Well, I might flash the BIOS or use maxwell bios tweaker. (I am happy wih 1,2GHz at the lowest voltage possible). On the other hand... you can undervolt any AMD GPU and you don´t have to deal with some driver crap I had to today.

Give us some numbers. 980Ti was always hot. Even a 970 can be hot at 1435Mhz depending on ambient Tº. 

I had a 970 at 1400 gaming at 30ºC ambient and i saw high 70's most of the time gaming AAA's. I just played with "target FPS" and locked to 120 @1080p, which took care of the extra juice the card had for some games that i did not care about going that high (LoL, Indie games, old games, CS:GO, etc). 

 

Depending on your ambient Tº, case cooling, etc a slight voltage change and 200mhz drop wont do sh*t to your temp. 980Ti has a ton of CUDA cores sweating like a bunch of fat guys in a sauna. 

[Lawliet93]

I changed the TIM on the card and that reduced the temperatures by quite a bit (gotta love that thermal grizzly stuff). I am getting about 74°C at most, but it's usually in the high 60's (at about 42% fan speed). What I don't like is the amount of heat kicked out into the system, it's way more than my old r9 280 Oc used to. And I believe, that I don't need almost 1,2V to maintain 1,2Ghz.