Lowering Voltages

[xFluing]

I'm looking to possibly try undervolting my card because it's already running pretty hot with the overclock in some games (Shadow Warrior 2013)

Question is, how do I handle voltages to see if they're stable or not? How big of a step should I decrease in? 1? 10? 50?

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

Why not just underclock your card?

[xFluing]

1 minute ago, bob51zhang said:

Why not just underclock your card?

Because the overclock I have gives it a huge helping hand, I used to have lots of micro-stutters without it, they were completely gone afterwards.

[xFluing]

Besides, it's not running hot per-se, it's just that I set the cooler to ramp up all the way to 100% (dual fan design too) so as to keep up with the temperatures and keep it around the 75 degree mark, and it still gets 75-76 degrees, just wanted to give the cooler an easier time. This only happens in Shadow Warrior, though it stays at around 70 in other demanding games.

[Mira Yurizaki]

8 minutes ago, xFluing said:

Question is, how do I handle voltages to see if they're stable or not? How big of a step should I decrease in? 1? 10? 50?

The same way you would with any change in the characteristic of hardware: subject it to a stress test for some time. As for how big of a step, there wouldn't be a harm in starting at 50mV. If it breaks, find the halfway point between the breakage value and the last value that worked, then divide and conquer from there.

 

6 minutes ago, bob51zhang said:

Why not just underclock your card?

Changing the voltage is an exponential change in TDP. If for example, the voltage was at 1.135V and the speed was at 2.0GHz, dropping the voltage by 50mV would result in roughly the same TDP drop as dropping the clock speed to 1.8GHz but keeping the voltage a 1.135V. You get to keep the performance and drop the temperature if you can get away with just lowering the voltage.

Edited April 3, 2018 by M.Yurizaki

[xFluing]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The same way you would with any change in the characteristic of hardware: subject it to a stress test for some time. As for how big of a step, there wouldn't be a harm in starting at 50mV. If it breaks, find the halfway point between the breakage value and the last value that work, then divide and conquer from there.

 

Changing the voltage is an exponential change in TDP. If for example, the voltage was at 1.135V and the speed was at 2.0GHz, dropping the voltage by 50mV would result in roughly the same TDP drop as dropping the clock speed to 1.8GHz but keeping the voltage a 1.135V. You get to keep the performance and drop the temperature if you can get away with just lowering the voltage.

Alright thanks, but for my peace of mind, crashes caused by not enough voltage shouldn't harm the card right?

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, xFluing said:

Alright thanks, but for my peace of mind, crashes caused by not enough voltage shouldn't harm the card right?

It shouldn't. I can't imagine why any serious harm would happen.

[xFluing]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It shouldn't. I can't imagine why any serious harm would happen.

OK good, because earlier I tried running heaven with 825 mV and it instantly crashed leaving my HDMI monitor completely black and the DVI one in artifacts, and even though I knew this doesn't harm the video card, I still was a little worried in the back of my head, but yeah thanks for clearing things out.

 

Edit: the reason I went so far down is I saw someone else supposedly running the card at 825mV but that more than likely (now that I've crashed) was the voltage at idle.