General Discussions

Been a while since I last posted in here, life and all that jazz, but this is a good question especially right now with energy bills in countries going up and up consistently.

How many people actually knew you can run at top clock speeds/boosted speeds at a lower voltage? At a lower voltage not only do you get the same performance but you lower your consumption and heat generation.

For example in one PC in my home a 3070ti is running at 875mv at 1935mhz clock speeds. For a comparison Dying Light 2, before undervoltage it would run at 1440p with 4k DLSS upscaling at around 63C, 4k native it was 71C. Undervoltage settings saw 1440p/4k upscaling at 54C, 4k native was 62C.

Good thing is this, it doesn't damage your card what so ever.

So how do you do it?

With MSI afterburner is probably the easiest way, by pressing Ctrl+F you will get this popping up when using the app.

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First thing to do is test your card as is, using some benchmarking software - usually the Heaven benchmark is good and fast. Take a note of temps etc, you can use Afterburner to run Riva Tuner Stats showing temps in game etc. But the most important is the top clock speeds your GPU will run at, on the 3070ti I am using to show it is at top typically 1950mhz, but 1935 is a good average.

Now with this information, we can reduce the curve in the previous picture using afterburner to reduce the voltage. We reduce the core clock, by sliding down the bar to make sure the top of the curve is a few mhz below the top average speed, for example if mine is 1935mhz, I will set the top of the curve down 200mhz-ish. This is important.

Link

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Now you have to find your GPUs boost clock speed, mine is 1875mhz before boosting, and that sits about 950, so try 900mV first, to do this we go along the mV scale below find 900 go up, and move the square in line with 900 up to 1935mhz (the amount the GPU went to in Heaven benchmark). Like so in this picture. (you can use the arrow keys to be more precise)

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Now all you have to do is click Accept and the curve will flatten out like this.

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Now try it out in the benchmark, did it run fine? You will notice the temps have dropped. If as says it runs fine, try again with -25mV less, so in my case it would be 875mV to try, then 850mV. Try until the benchmark software crashes, then you know you can't use that mV setting. In my case it crashed on 850mV, so I set it to 875mV. And all my games run fine and at a lower temp with the same performance.

Save as a preset, so you can click on that preset without having to do it all again.

AMD cards are a bit different to do I believe, but I haven't used one in donkeys years... so maybe someone can tell you how, but it might be a bit similar.


[Edited by DABhand, 9/8/2022 5:36:51 AM]

That's good info DAB. I personally also do this for my cards, but you are correct in that most casual users do not know about it. Thanks for taking the time to write up a nice tutorial.