Is Afterburner's power limit safe?

[stratuh]

There's a game I'm playing called Trek to Yomi. At max settings at 3440x1440, my 3080 gives 200fps and shows 100% utilization and gets very hot. Limiting the framerate to 120fps keeps utilization at 100% and my thermals are the same. Even dropping settings to lowest and with a 24fps cap, it's still 100%, and still just as hot.

 

I think the game could be soaking GPU utilization, or forcing a specific power level because nothing I do changes utilization or thermals. I'm worried about thermals because I use SFFPC.

 

I know I can't set a maximum GPU utilization, but I can use Afterburner to set a power limit, meaning I can get lower thermals while sacrificing performance. I have enough performance headroom that this isn't an issue.

 

But is it safe? I have no experience with over/under clocking/volting. I just want to set it to 60% power limit and off I go. Is it that simple or I need to fiddle with voltages and/or clocks, or will Afterburner do it all (safely)?

[Eigenvektor]

Lowering voltages is generally safe, but it can lead to an unstable system that crashes under load.

 

Take it slow, lower things a tiny bit, test if the system remains stable in various games/benchmarks, then repeat until you've found the limit where it stops being stable. Then dial things back a bit for good measure.

 

Are you sure the fps cap in the game works? If it remains at 100% load, I would assume it doesn't.

[stratuh]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

Lowering voltages is generally safe, but it can lead to an unstable system that crashes under load.

 

Take it slow, lower things a tiny bit, test if the system remains stable in various games/benchmarks, then repeat until you've found the limit where it stops being stable. Then dial things back a bit for good measure.

 

Are you sure the fps cap in the game works? If it remains at 100% load, I would assume it doesn't.

Afterburner has a slider for "power limit" from 0 to 100%. It doesn't have much granularity like voltage or clocks (Afterburner does, but not with this specific setting). I don't really want to mess with fine tuning voltages or whatever, I thought the power limit option just does it all for me?

 

And yeah. I had a friend compare on his 4060 and it kept 100% utilization irrespective of settings. I also tried on the Deck and same deal. I think it's just the game, not something specific to my system.

[PDifolco]

34 minutes ago, stratuh said:

Afterburner has a slider for "power limit" from 0 to 100%. It doesn't have much granularity like voltage or clocks (Afterburner does, but not with this specific setting). I don't really want to mess with fine tuning voltages or whatever, I thought the power limit option just does it all for me?

 

And yeah. I had a friend compare on his 4060 and it kept 100% utilization irrespective of settings. I also tried on the Deck and same deal. I think it's just the game, not something specific to my system.

Yup just drop power 20% down, you'll lose 10% performance and gain 10C, with no instability

Undervolting may work but if you don't want the card to run at full you'd also need to reduce max clocks down to around 1700MHz

[stratuh]

14 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Yup just drop power 20% down, you'll lose 10% performance and gain 10C, with no instability

Undervolting may work but if you don't want the card to run at full you'd also need to reduce max clocks down to around 1700MHz

Did you mean it would drop 10C? Less power is less heat, right?

[PDifolco]

47 minutes ago, stratuh said:

Did you mean it would drop 10C? Less power is less heat, right?

Yes

[stratuh]

1 hour ago, PDifolco said:

Yes

This is pretty cool: I dropped power to 70% and temps dropped about 10c and performance is more or less the same. In Tetris Effect, temps dropped 20c and still keeps at my monitor's refreshrate ceiling.

 

It may be fisher price compared to over/under clocking/volting, but it's a start!

[PDifolco]

1 minute ago, stratuh said:

This is pretty cool: I dropped power to 70% and temps dropped about 10c and performance is more or less the same. In Tetris Effect, temps dropped 20c and still keeps at my monitor's refreshrate ceiling.

 

It may be fisher price compared to over/under clocking/volting, but it's a start!

Cool !

Thing to know is that the more power you send to a chip the less it performs better, so usually 70 to 80% of the max power gives best efficiency