Power Limiting Trouble

[AuroraRED]

Hi guys, brand new to the forum. I recently purchased a Radeon VII when xfx had them on sale for $500 and of course my immediate goal was to see how much extra juice I could get out of it by OCing. To make a long story short, I did some minor overclocking on MSI Afterburner with the stock air cooler and could get 1900mhz core/1200mhz memory stable by just raise the power limit (stock voltage was 1074mV but I didn't touch it because of how hot it ran). I got an EK waterblock for it and added it to my custom loop expecting to be able to crank the clock speed by adding additional voltage. Temperature is obviously no longer an issue, however, no matter what I do I cannot get a stable core clock past 1980mhz. I believe the problem I am seeing is related to the wattage. When running running wattman's metric overlay during Heaven runs the card will not draw more than 300 watts. Every time it gets near that number it throttles the clock speed. This was taking place on a 750watt psu. I switched it out with a 1000watt psu wanting to see if that was the issue and the first run I tried the card would spike into the 320 watt range and the coreclock was much higher. Because of this I assumed the old PSU was the issue, however, since that first run the card has gone back to not drawing more than 300 watts and throttling when it approaches it. From what I read this card should be drawing far more power than this when I am overclocking, why am I hitting a wall?

 

System:

Radeon VII (water cooled)

Stock Ryzen 3900x (water cooled)

G.Skill Rip Jaws V @ 3600mhz

Asus x570 Strix E-Gaming

EVGA 1000 80+Gold

Samsung 850 Pro

[Jurrunio]

Undervolt it a bit, stock voltage on AMD cards are always too high

[BTGbullseye]

1 hour ago, Jurrunio said:

Undervolt it a bit, stock voltage on AMD cards are always too high

Always too high, unless you're overclocking them to their limit. (then usually just slightly too low)

[AuroraRED]

Are graphics cards always bottlenecked at their rated wattage even when overvolting? 

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, AuroraRED said:

Are graphics cards always bottlenecked at their rated wattage even when overvolting? 

Modern graphics cards will overclock themselves until one of the following is reached:

• GPU or some other component is too hot
• Power consumption reached a limit
• Voltage reached a limit

Overclocking is affected by all three parameters.

 

However, this isn't always indicative of a "bottleneck." A bottleneck is when the GPU can't perform at its best because the CPU is too busy with other things to do than feed the GPU with instructions on rendering a frame.

[HumdrumPenguin]

16 hours ago, AuroraRED said:

Hi guys, brand new to the forum. I recently purchased a Radeon VII when xfx had them on sale for $500 and of course my immediate goal was to see how much extra juice I could get out of it by OCing. To make a long story short, I did some minor overclocking on MSI Afterburner with the stock air cooler and could get 1900mhz core/1200mhz memory stable by just raise the power limit (stock voltage was 1074mV but I didn't touch it because of how hot it ran). I got an EK waterblock for it and added it to my custom loop expecting to be able to crank the clock speed by adding additional voltage. Temperature is obviously no longer an issue, however, no matter what I do I cannot get a stable core clock past 1980mhz. I believe the problem I am seeing is related to the wattage. When running running wattman's metric overlay during Heaven runs the card will not draw more than 300 watts. Every time it gets near that number it throttles the clock speed. This was taking place on a 750watt psu. I switched it out with a 1000watt psu wanting to see if that was the issue and the first run I tried the card would spike into the 320 watt range and the coreclock was much higher. Because of this I assumed the old PSU was the issue, however, since that first run the card has gone back to not drawing more than 300 watts and throttling when it approaches it. From what I read this card should be drawing far more power than this when I am overclocking, why am I hitting a wall?

 

System:

Radeon VII (water cooled)

Stock Ryzen 3900x (water cooled)

G.Skill Rip Jaws V @ 3600mhz

Asus x570 Strix E-Gaming

EVGA 1000 80+Gold

Samsung 850 Pro

If undervolting doesn’t work, then flashing a bios that unlocks everything in the card may be the only other solution. That will void your warranty, so I wouldn’t recommend anything like it on a new card.