A GPU overclocking thought experiment

[Totally Average Gameplay]

If you underclock the core clock and overclock the memory clock. Would it improve the GPU performance? People say that OCing the core requires a lot of voltage to increase it by a small bit and produces a marginal improvement. Meanwhile others claim that memory OCs produces an even better result conpared to Core OCs. And some claim that their RX 580's (8gb) can be improved by just letting the core at stock and adjusting the memory and undervolt the unused power from there. This might be beneficial especially to GPUs using HBM memory like Vega , where Mem OC is dependent to the temperature. That too might be affected by the Core's temps since it is much closer to the die.

[Jurrunio]

3 minutes ago, Totally Average Gameplay said:

Would it improve the GPU performance?

Maybe, especially if the GPU was memory bottlenecked heavily earlier on

 

9 minutes ago, Totally Average Gameplay said:

People say that OCing the core requires a lot of voltage to increase it by a small bit and produces a marginal improvement.

That's wrong, you could totally overclock by a decent margin with stock voltage. Espectially on AMD cards, which tends to run overly conservative (high) stock voltage

 

10 minutes ago, Totally Average Gameplay said:

Meanwhile others claim that memory OCs produces an even better result conpared to Core OCs. And some claim that their RX 580's (8gb) can be improved by just letting the core at stock and adjusting the memory

Yes, because memory bottleneck

 

11 minutes ago, Totally Average Gameplay said:

ndervolt the unused power from there

this is what you should consider in the first place, underclocking without undervolting is just reducing performance with little power draw drop

[Levent]

21 minutes ago, Totally Average Gameplay said:

1-) If you underclock the core clock and overclock the memory clock. Would it improve the GPU performance?

2-) People say that OCing the core requires a lot of voltage to increase it by a small bit and produces a marginal improvement.

3-) Meanwhile others claim that memory OCs produces an even better result conpared to Core OCs.

4-) And some claim that their RX 580's (8gb) can be improved by just letting the core at stock and adjusting the memory and undervolt the unused power from there. This might be beneficial especially to GPUs using HBM memory like Vega , where Mem OC is dependent to the temperature. That too might be affected by the Core's temps since it is much closer to the die.

1-) There is no way underclocking core clocks and increasing memory clocks will improve performance unless there is temperature or power throttling.

2-) Not really, unless you got a very very shitty overclocking card you probably wouldnt even need to increase voltage for 5-10% core speed increases and ofcourse that would be a minuscule gain. (On that note, most of the GCN cards overclock like crazy even with stock voltages, up to %20)

3-) Really depends on the application

4-) That is called Power/Thermal throttling.

[Yebi]

I can't really think of a reason why underclocking the core would help you overclock the memory better. Pretty sure silicon lottery limits usually get reached before thermal or power limits

[Totally Average Gameplay]

Aight, so core OC is still a core component in the tweaks. I thought of the core UC because every time the Core Clocks have been raised for at least a hundred MHz it just becomes a few fps gain. But again, I just wondered what would happen if I do that because NVIDIA's cards had been core OC'ed out of the gate. Case & point, 1080 Ti.

[SkilledRebuilds]

25 minutes ago, Yebi said:

I can't really think of a reason why underclocking the core would help you overclock the memory better. Pretty sure silicon lottery limits usually get reached before thermal or power limits

The 75w models may get a benefit from a core reduction and a memory OC.

GTX1650 of a friend could do more VRAM OC's 900+ as opposed to 400+ without my 90Mhz Core OC addition... I can see the power usage climb down with reduced core and go up a tad with the 900+ higher memory again..

Thats the only example i've come across in many years..

[Totally Average Gameplay]

2 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

The 75w models may get a benefit from a core reduction and a memory OC.

GTX1650 of a friend could do more VRAM OC's 900+ as opposed to 400+ without my 90Mhz Core OC addition... I can see the power usage climb down with reduced core and go up a tad with the 900+ higher memory again..

Thats the only example i've come across in many years..

At least it worked.