Undervolting a 280X

Shoob · May 29, 2016

I've been experimenting undervolting my Asus R9 280x. Went from the stock 1.163V to 1.1V and there was a 6-7°C difference in load temperature, which is not insignificant when my GPU is running at the mid 70s whilst playing a GPU intensive game and goes to high 70s while benchmarking in Unigine Heaven or Valley.

I know my temps are still within limits, but a slight reduction is always welcome.

I've ran Unigine Heaven 5 times and played TW3 for a few hours and there was no difference in the performance and there weren't any instabilities or artifacts.

Are there any risks other than a probable system instability during prolonged gaming sessions?

EarthboundHero · May 29, 2016

No, if anything it'll help extend the cards life.

Shoob · May 29, 2016

53 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Less voltage and lower temps is always good.

Worst that could happen is a GPU crash due to spike in power requirement (long term instability)

But you raise the voltage/power limit and its all good again.

For example I undervolted my 290X Lightning.

Thanks for your response. It seems to be holding up nicely while remaining at low 70s in Unigine Heaven and high 60s in TW3, which is great considering the fan curve I've set is optimized toward silence. The actual max voltage according to GPU-Z is 1.08V.

Do you remember how much you reduced the voltage and what were the results in temps?

If there are any other 280X / HD7970 GE users reading, can you report the voltage your GPU is operating at? I saw that most 280X's run at around 1.2V out of the box.

Prysin · May 29, 2016

1 hour ago, Pandalf said:

I've been experimenting undervolting my Asus R9 280x. Went from the stock 1.163V to 1.1V and there was a 6-7°C difference in load temperature, which is not insignificant when my GPU is running at the mid 70s whilst playing a GPU intensive game and goes to high 70s while benchmarking in Unigine Heaven or Valley.

I know my temps are still within limits, but a slight reduction is always welcome.

I've ran Unigine Heaven 5 times and played TW3 for a few hours and there was no difference in the performance and there weren't any instabilities or artifacts.

Are there any risks other than a probable system instability during prolonged gaming sessions?

there are rare cases where chips stop working due to too low voltage. But you would need to undervolt it much more for that to happen.

Should hold just fine.