Why is my GT 1030's MSI Afterburner voltage slider not doing anything?

[EpikoTH]

Hello. I have a Gigabyte OC Nvidia GT 1030 and have been using it for about 2 1/2 years now. I know that it is very bad for gaming, around the 750 Ti in terms of performance, but I have a very very strict budget and it's all I could afford since. And to siphon every inch of performance I could out of this baby, I resorted to MSI Afterburner after seeing it be used in several LTT videos before. This was the first time I had ever overclocked any of my computer components because I had originally used it in a prebuilt HP Z200 SFF Workstation that I got for free (which didn't actually fit in the case because my specific model wasn't the low-profile version so r.i.p.) so Afterburner's "OC Scanner" was a big boon and it fit really well with the specs of that computer back in the day, the first generation core i5's. Unfortunately, I have upgraded since, and built an entirely new computer with a Ryzen 3 3200G and while I have the idea of overclocking that down (more voltage and higher level load line calibration = more OC headroom usually), it doesn't seem to apply to my GPU because as I stated in the title, the voltage slider doesn't do ANYTHING. Doesn't change the voltage at all (the screenshots are different because of fluctuation). And I am worried that it is sacrificing power and bottlenecking my CPU even more than it already is. I have some screenshots that show that there is no difference between the slider at 0% and 100% while running Kombustor, and I let a few seconds after switching between screenshots so that it shows that there is no slow transition. I have no idea if this is due to the fact that this GPU is a PCIe slot only card and it has no 6-pin or 8-pin connectors, or if this is part of it's manufacturing technique or if my card is just broken. Any thoughts?

[Entropy.]

Erm... I can't help you with that but you do know you could've probably gotten a used 1060 or 1070 at that price? 

[EpikoTH]

2 minutes ago, Brok3n But who cares? said:

Erm... I can't help you with that but you do know you could've probably gotten a used 1060 or 1070 at that price? 

I don't trust buying used hardware

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, EpikoTH said:

I don't trust buying used hardware

GPUs are typically a pretty reliable thing to buy even used. Especially the lower-end stuff, since pretty much no one uses those for mining or such.

[dizmo]

Probably just doesn't have any more performance to give. It's a very, very bottom tier card.

[mariushm]

In order to adjust voltage you need a dc-dc converter on the video card (the gpu chip vrm) that actually has the intelligence to adjust voltage and receive commands somehow from the video card firmware (video card bios).

Being a very budget video card, the vrm may only support a few presets (idle, normal, high) or none at all.

 

the gt1030 is really cut down chip, that's probably choked by the memory (bandwidth and frequency), so boosting the gpu chip voltage probably wouldn't make a difference.

[EpikoTH]

Just now, mariushm said:

In order to adjust voltage you need a dc-dc converter on the video card (the gpu chip vrm) that actually has the intelligence to adjust voltage and receive commands somehow from the video card firmware (video card bios).

Being a very budget video card, the vrm may only support a few presets (idle, normal, high) or none at all.

 

the gt1030 is really cut down chip, that's probably choked by the memory (bandwidth and frequency), so boosting the gpu chip voltage probably wouldn't make a difference.

thaaaat makes sense, actually. Thanks!