MSI Trident 3 Upgrade to GTX 1070 while undervolting GPU

Spkt0r · September 27, 2018

Hello All

I was able to upgrade my MSI Trident 3, I5 7400, 1060 3gb version. I purchased a used ex-mining GPU MSI GTX 1070 Aero Itx version ($232 shipping included from ebay), I purchased a (PCIe 6 Pin Male to 8 Pin (6+2) Male PCI Express Power Adapter Cable for Graphics Video Card 20-inches TeamProfitcom from amazon $8.99, I could not find a smaller cable with the same flatness) before removing the 1060 3gb i ran Heaven benchmark 3x on 1080p, and 3 x 1440p I saw that in HWiNFO64 the most watts it used was 137+watts and then I played Doom and similar results as far as wattage was concerned. So I removed the 1060 3gb (duh) with its small 6pin to 6pin power connector and put the new 8pin to 6pin cable on the 1070 first and had to bend the cable at the 1070 end to fit into the very small space, you will have to wrestle it in a little so be-careful. Started up the Trident with the 1070 and ran heaven for shyts and giggles and of course system restarted did the same with Doom and was like ok hit power limit. Started Trident again and this time I used MSI afterburner to lower the Power Limit % to 70% and ran all the same as above and lo and behold was only using 100watts in heaven and 105watts there about in Doom 1440p locked 60fps ultra settings, I was able to go from 70% to 78% for my particular card for a 5-8watt increase. oh just to be on the safe side I used Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel XTU) to Undervolt The CPU by 0.140V. Strangely I was hitting over 2015-2025 ghz on the GPU with the under-volt on Doom, when I used the 1070 on my work rig with a I6700k and a 750wat platinum PSU i was floating around 1980ish and stabilized at 1886ghz on the 1070 dont know what up with that but. Is it worth doing? this only you can decide and I have not had the opportunity to test other games like rise of the tomb raider which sends wattage to max lvls on a few gpus I have. OK so I tested ROTTR and I had to lower the Power Limit slider to 65% to be able to run the game at 1440p very high setting locked 60fps.

Make sure to tape the flat cable to the frame as shown if the cable is to close to the GPU you will see an increase of at least 5c to 6c degrees.