Undervolt/Underclock MSI Afterburner custom curve changes on its own. Any tips in general for first time OCing?

MrlUnleashed · September 21, 2021

So I have tried to undervolt/underclock my 3060 and have been pretty successful with it, didnt want to do anything too extreme just to reduce temps and power draw, also the coil whine almost disappears, its a thing that has been following this pc from its first iteration.

The first image is stock curve with only +500 on the memory, max core boost around 2010MHz under load, and the second is my first attempt on undervolting or underclocking, set to 937mV @ 1860MHz and stable.

It does lower the performance a little but not by too much for what I play, and I can still fine tune it a bit more as it also ran at 950mV around 1950MHz or so stable, but I went further and settled on what it is now.

I dont have screenshots running any stress tests but doing that I got total power draw from around 170W on stock down to about 120W and less while running Unigine heaven 1080p on ultra settings.

Playing Modern Warfare it was on average 10-20W less in both cases, and temps were about the same at 50-55C on both, but undervolted I got the fan speeds from 84% stock to match the temp +10, so if its 50C fans were at 60% speed.

Now the issue, or more of a nuisance is that the second curve wouldnt stay at 1860 but vary all the time, going lower or even over 1900 at times, although I didnt have any crashes or so but maybe some weird behavior in Cod was because of that, but the voltage still remained the same.

The second curve I got in a way I set the core to default first, typed -250 and applied and then dragged the dot on 937mV up to desired frequency and applied which resulted in the straight line.

Also locking it didnt do the trick it stayed at wanted voltage but clocks still jumped around. I just dont want it to vary too much to not get any crashes or worse.

The question is does the variation in the curve happen usually and how to fix it if its possible, and any other tips on setting the curve in any better way Id much appreciate it.