GPU Undervolting questions?

[PcBeExpensive]

1. Does undervolting your GPU decrease performance
2. What is the goal of undervolting
3. Is it hard to do
4. How do I do it



Thanks in advance!

[Guest]

Undervolting GPU shouldn't affect the performance
The goal of undervolting is to prevent the amount of heat it produces. How? V = voltage = rate of electricity = the slower the electricity is entering, and higher the amperage, the less heat it should generate.

It shouldn't be hard to do. Check out a few guides on youtube on undervolting the GPU.

 

[PcBeExpensive]

4 minutes ago, reflext said:

Undervolting GPU shouldn't affect the performance
The goal of undervolting is to prevent the amount of heat it produces. How? V = voltage = rate of electricity = the slower the electricity is entering, and higher the amperage, the less heat it should generate.

It shouldn't be hard to do. Check out a few guides on youtube on undervolting the GPU.

 

Ok, thank you for responding.

[wildgg]

11 hours ago, PcBeExpensive said:

1. Does undervolting your GPU decrease performance
2. What is the goal of undervolting
3. Is it hard to do
4. How do I do it



Thanks in advance!

1. Yes and no. This depends on how far down in Voltage you are going. You need enough voltage to run a certain clockspeed and this depends per card.
2. Reduce power draw. Reduce heat, lower noise, better clockspeeds and maybe even longer lifespand of the card.
3. No but you do want to run some benchmarks to make sure you're undervolting profile is stable for daily use.
4. I highly recommend you go watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqpfYTi43TE (the proces is the same for most cards),It's super simple to do.

Extra info: If you want to get the best performance possible while reducing power,heat etc find out what the TDP is of your card. If you have a card that's limited to 300Watt then you want to make sure during undervolting that you don't hit that 300Watt limit, you want to aim for 290Watt, the reason you don't want to hit the cards power limit is because the card will downclock it's speed, it won't downclock by much but you won't get the set clockspeed you put in the undervolt profile if you keep hitting power limits.

[PcBeExpensive]

1 hour ago, Wildgg said:

1. Yes and no. This depends on how far down in Voltage you are going. You need enough voltage to run a certain clockspeed and this depends per card.
2. Reduce power draw. Reduce heat, lower noise, better clockspeeds and maybe even longer lifespand of the card.
3. No but you do want to run some benchmarks to make sure you're undervolting profile is stable for daily use.
4. I highly recommend you go watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqpfYTi43TE (the proces is the same for most cards),It's super simple to do.

Extra info: If you want to get the best performance possible while reducing power,heat etc find out what the TDP is of your card. If you have a card that's limited to 300Watt then you want to make sure during undervolting that you don't hit that 300Watt limit, you want to aim for 290Watt, the reason you don't want to hit the cards power limit is because the card will downclock it's speed, it won't downclock by much but you won't get the set clockspeed you put in the undervolt profile if you keep hitting power limits.

so go under the tdp of my card? Undervolting gives better performance?? Wow. So I have a 2060 with a TDP of 160 watts, should I aim for 150 watts or lower like 140?

[NobleGamer]

I would just find a GPU program, even NVIDIA's own performance overlay if you are on team Green, that has a simple "power" slider and move that lower than 100. I've used EVGA Precision X. Seems way easier than trying to mess with two separate power sliders in trial and error, unless someone can explain significant benefits of controlling voltage independently.

 

For me with an RTX 3080 at 1440p with a target of 90+ FPS, 80% power seemed to be a sweet spot between power (and thus heat) savings and FPS hit.

[PcBeExpensive]

30 minutes ago, NobleGamer said:

I would just find a GPU program, even NVIDIA's own performance overlay if you are on team Green, that has a simple "power" slider and move that lower than 100. I've used EVGA Precision X. Seems way easier than trying to mess with two separate power sliders in trial and error, unless someone can explain significant benefits of controlling voltage independently.

 

For me with an RTX 3080 at 1440p with a target of 90+ FPS, 80% power seemed to be a sweet spot between power (and thus heat) savings and FPS hit.

ok, i will use afterburner and move it to around 85 to 90 percent?

[NobleGamer]

1 hour ago, PcBeExpensive said:

ok, i will use afterburner and move it to around 85 to 90 percent?

That's a good place to start and see how the FPS and power/heat is. There's still some trial and error with this, but it's less than it would be with 2 levers, and it's less likely to result in system instability or shutdown.

[PcBeExpensive]

8 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

That's a good place to start and see how the FPS and power/heat is. There's still some trial and error with this, but it's less than it would be with 2 levers, and it's less likely to result in system instability or shutdown.

Ok, so can I keep heavens benchmark running and adjust it and see what happens?

[NobleGamer]

1 minute ago, PcBeExpensive said:

Ok, so can I keep heavens benchmark running and adjust it and see what happens?

Yes, or better yet run an actual game you like to play and check difference in FPS before and after changing the power setting.  You may want to restart the game between power setting changes.

[PcBeExpensive]

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

Yes, or better yet run an actual game you like to play and check difference in FPS before and after changing the power setting.  You may want to restart the game between power setting changes.

Oh ok, thanks for the tips.

[YoungBlade]

1. Undervolting can either increase, decrease, or have no impact on performance depending on your goals.

2. The goal of undervolting varies from case to case. You can undervolt with the goal of achieving higher performance with no additional power draw, equivalent performance with less power draw, or more efficiency with a sacrifice in performance for the sake of reducing power draw further.

3. It is equivalent in difficulty to overclocking - which is to say, as easy or hard as you want it to be - you can just do some basic things like move some sliders, or you can go deep and tweak your card for hours on end.

4. For Nvidia, MSI Afterburner is the recommended software. For AMD, you can use Afterburner or the built in Tuning options in Adrenaline software - your choice.

 

Let me know how far down this rabbit hole you want to go and if you'd like more details on how to achieve a particular result. I've got a 2060 Super that I've tweaked somewhat extensively, so my experience should be relevant to your own 2060 undervolting.

 

Just remember that this all depends on the Silicon Lottery. Your card might be able to perform better than stock at 75% power draw, or might just barely make stock performance at 98% power. It depends on your card.

[PcBeExpensive]

3 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

1. Undervolting can either increase, decrease, or have no impact on performance depending on your goals.

2. The goal of undervolting varies from case to case. You can undervolt with the goal of achieving higher performance with no additional power draw, equivalent performance with less power draw, or more efficiency with a sacrifice in performance for the sake of reducing power draw further.

3. It is equivalent in difficulty to overclocking - which is to say, as easy or hard as you want it to be - you can just do some basic things like move some sliders, or you can go deep and tweak your card for hours on end.

4. For Nvidia, MSI Afterburner is the recommended software. For AMD, you can use Afterburner or the built in Tuning options in Adrenaline software - your choice.

 

Let me know how far down this rabbit hole you want to go and if you'd like more details on how to achieve a particular result. I've got a 2060 Super that I've tweaked somewhat extensively, so my experience should be relevant to your own 2060 undervolting.

 

Just remember that this all depends on the Silicon Lottery. Your card might be able to perform better than stock at 75% power draw, or might just barely make stock performance at 98% power. It depends on your card.

My card is a 2060 OC, temps are not bad but the lower the better I guess. I would love to undervolt it and increase performance. do you know how that would be possible and how to do that? I do want to get decently deep into it without making it overly complicated. I will be using Afterburner for this.

[YoungBlade]

42 minutes ago, PcBeExpensive said:

My card is a 2060 OC, temps are not bad but the lower the better I guess. I would love to undervolt it and increase performance. do you know how that would be possible and how to do that? I do want to get decently deep into it without making it overly complicated. I will be using Afterburner for this.

The way to undervolt a card and gain performance is pretty simple - just leave the power slider at 100% and then do an undervolt. The reason this works is two-fold. First, lower voltages will mean that the card draws less power at a given clockspeed, so when clocking to, say, 1900MHz, the card uses less power than before while running at the same speed. This means that it now has more power headroom, so it could potentially clock higher. Second, because of the way GPU boost works, your GPU will boost higher the lower the temperature is. Because the card will run cooler at a given clockspeed, it will be able to maintain that clockspeed for longer and/or boost higher.

 

Instead of messing with the sliders, you're going to use the Curve Editor, which can be accessed by clicking on the little bar chart next to "Core Clock (MHz)" in Afterburner. You can also press "Ctrl+F" to do the same thing.

 

What you do there is you take one of the dots that corresponds to a given voltage, and drag it up to have the card use that voltage for that frequency. You then click "Apply" in Afterburner, and it will automatically adjust the other dots so that the voltage always gets higher the more frequency it has.

 

You can see this done in this video from Optimum Tech on GPU undervolting. I've got it set to start at the point when he starts talking about undervolting Turing cards.

 

Here's what my profile looks like as an example of a final result:

Spoiler

You can see how the curve becomes very flat as it approaches the maximum frequency. This is what you want to see - the card will use the lowest voltage for a given frequency, so a flat horizontal line means that it will default to the voltage on the far left of that line.

 

The biggest jump in frequency at a given voltage that I was able to get over stock was 1905MHz at 875mV - which is a 160MHz improvement at that voltage. The other improvements are more modest (around +100-125MHz at a given voltage).

 

You can compare this to the stock curve, which doesn't rise as much before flattening out:

Spoiler

The overall result is that the card boosts higher when it's been running for a long time. At stock, I typically get around 1850MHz after gaming for a while, but this undervolt gives me around 1950MHz most of the time.

 

You may also notice that I increased the temperature limit to the max, but kept the power limit at 100. This gives the card more thermal headroom to help it boost higher for longer - although the card generally doesn't run above the mid 70s with these settings. I was playing Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier tonight using this profile, and it usually hovered around 70C, maxing at 74C, which is totally safe. However, in the event that the card does get hotter, I don't want it to clock down from thermals until the temperature gets fairly high.

 

I am slightly overclocking the memory as well, because that doesn't really impact power consumption that much, yet it gives a slight performance bump. It is fairly common to pair a GPU undervolt with a VRAM overclock for this reason.

[PcBeExpensive]

11 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

The way to undervolt a card and gain performance is pretty simple - just leave the power slider at 100% and then do an undervolt. The reason this works is two-fold. First, lower voltages will mean that the card draws less power at a given clockspeed, so when clocking to, say, 1900MHz, the card uses less power than before while running at the same speed. This means that it now has more power headroom, so it could potentially clock higher. Second, because of the way GPU boost works, your GPU will boost higher the lower the temperature is. Because the card will run cooler at a given clockspeed, it will be able to maintain that clockspeed for longer and/or boost higher.

 

Instead of messing with the sliders, you're going to use the Curve Editor, which can be accessed by clicking on the little bar chart next to "Core Clock (MHz)" in Afterburner. You can also press "Ctrl+F" to do the same thing.

 

What you do there is you take one of the dots that corresponds to a given voltage, and drag it up to have the card use that voltage for that frequency. You then click "Apply" in Afterburner, and it will automatically adjust the other dots so that the voltage always gets higher the more frequency it has.

 

You can see this done in this video from Optimum Tech on GPU undervolting. I've got it set to start at the point when he starts talking about undervolting Turing cards.

 

Here's what my profile looks like as an example of a final result:

  Hide contents

You can see how the curve becomes very flat as it approaches the maximum frequency. This is what you want to see - the card will use the lowest voltage for a given frequency, so a flat horizontal line means that it will default to the voltage on the far left of that line.

 

The biggest jump in frequency at a given voltage that I was able to get over stock was 1905MHz at 875mV - which is a 160MHz improvement at that voltage. The other improvements are more modest (around +100-125MHz at a given voltage).

 

You can compare this to the stock curve, which doesn't rise as much before flattening out:

  Hide contents

The overall result is that the card boosts higher when it's been running for a long time. At stock, I typically get around 1850MHz after gaming for a while, but this undervolt gives me around 1950MHz most of the time.

 

You may also notice that I increased the temperature limit to the max, but kept the power limit at 100. This gives the card more thermal headroom to help it boost higher for longer - although the card generally doesn't run above the mid 70s with these settings. I was playing Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier tonight using this profile, and it usually hovered around 70C, maxing at 74C, which is totally safe. However, in the event that the card does get hotter, I don't want it to clock down from thermals until the temperature gets fairly high.

 

I am slightly overclocking the memory as well, because that doesn't really impact power consumption that much, yet it gives a slight performance bump. It is fairly common to pair a GPU undervolt with a VRAM overclock for this reason.

ok, thank you for your very in depth replies! I will watch the videos and will set some time apart this weekend to try this.