Underclocking/Undervolting my GPU

Okjoek · May 21, 2018

This is my first time attempting this and I'm using my RX 460. I'm just using the Sapphire TRIXX program to change the settings and monitoring stuff with HWMonitor. Normally my GPU is reading about 72W while I play Planetside 2, but I turned the boost clock down to 650MHz and I'm incrementally pulling the voltage bar back as well and currently -66mV (which I assume just means the deviation from the default?) and I'm down to 41.15W while gaming in HWM. Not sure how far I should keep going or if there's any risks associated with what I'm doing. What should I be careful about?

My frames performance in Planetside 2 has decreased, but not enough to really prevent me from having fun. I'd imagine more of a performance drop would occur if I underclocked my CPU because the game is heavily CPU bound. Is it even possible to underclock/undervolt a locked Intel CPU?

I'm always trying to lower my power bill and this seems like another cool way of going about it.

hconverse02 · May 21, 2018

This will not lower your power bill by more than a dollar per month depending on how much you use your computer. Try using less ac/heat, that's a 3000w unit (or more) versus a 200-300w max computer.

Okjoek · May 21, 2018

23 minutes ago, hconverse02 said:

This will not lower your power bill by more than a dollar per month depending on how much you use your computer. Try using less ac/heat, that's a 3000w unit (or more) versus a 200-300w max computer.

I don't even use AC anymore. I do have a fan, but I'm trying to calculate what I'd need to do to make living off the grid more possible. For example I'm not sure how much solar panel it would take to run a PC for however long I need it because I rely on PC for a lot of stuff, I even use Youtube as a sleep aid a lot. Any when running on something like a battery it seems to me like halving my PC's power consumption could be a big deal.