Today I undervolted my brother’s amd rx 6950xt by 120mv ( at 125mv a game we tested would crash at 100% usage and max power draw ).
Also made his fan curve more agressive cause by default it never wen’t over 55% fan speed which is just stupid.
This in total lowered his temps across in mist games from average 80C to 55-60C and lowered power draw on average by 20W.
It also allowed him to play supraland at max settings with gpu not going over 70C instead of lowest setting 80C on average.
So yeah, if you never tried or bothered with undervolting try it and post your results. Or if you did it before post your story and results.
I undervolted my 5800X3D and 9800X3D and that helped with temps a lot.
I never undervolted my GPU, I generally go the other way with it. My 4080 lost the silicon lottery, couldn’t get any more out of it. Not sure if I won it with my 5080 because a lot of people seem to be having large gains, but I got my boost clock to to a little over 3 GHz and a +1GHz to the memory.
I didn’t have any luck undervolting my GPU; It would just crash with even the smallest voltage offset. That said, I have had success undervolting my CPU. I’d also suggest limiting the total power draw. No noticeable drop in performance for lower temps and reduced fan noise.
I wouldn’t recommended it if you don’t have fairly clean power. Definitely run into issues where a voltage drop in the mains would just shut off my system.
I undervolted my 5800x3d (each core individually) and it cut the temps by quite a bit, without affecting performance. Actually if anything you could say the performance arguably increased because it was no longer the hot little hog it was ootb.
Changing voltages and fan curves is super situational. And depends on how much you value noise over performance.
That said, I undervolted and underclocked the i7 cpu on my G501 gaming laptop back in the day.
This helped a ton, because the heatsink between the discrete GTX 660M and the CPU, shared a heatpipe. The CPU would only throttle at 90, while the GPU would throttle at something like 75. This meant that because it was basically always hotter, heat from the CPU would conduct via the heatpipe INTO THE GPU, causing it to always thermal throttle, and be unable to be cooled. Because even though it was maxing out and trying to cool down by throttling, the CPU would just keep going because for it the temps were fine. So it would keep pumping heat into the heatsinks and heatpipes, which would then keep the GPU hot, too.
Undervolting the CPU allowed it and the GPU to run at closer to same temps, raising FPS by way of allowing the GPU to actually run a full tilt, even though the CPU was then significantly slower.
Yes, agree that they are situational. In case if my laptop I’m unervolting mycou because if I won’t it will just crash when used at max speed.
Edit: in case of my brother pc, the temps were just horenderous for the perforformance he was getting. Plus the fans were barelly on even at 85C. Undervolting and making the fan curve more agresive allowed him the get much better temps at same fan speed, and lets him play some games he wasn’t able to before cause of themps. And the fans even at 100% are quieter than my laptops at 50% so he doesn’t mind them at all.
Do you know of good beginner friendly undervolting guides for AMD & Nvidia? This would go a long way towards people heeding your advice.
I followed a random guide I found on the internet for amd.
In amd case you can do it from their driver by going to performance tab and choosing tuning.
There you will find gpu setting, set them to manual and from there you can start changing fan speed and voltage. Voltage you change by 50mv first time and if stable by 25. When you come to a point where your game/program crashes you use the value from before that didn’t crash the game and that’s it.
As for nvidia I don’t know because I don’t own one and don’t have the money to own one ( they are 1k euro on average here for 4070 and 2.5k for 4090 on average ) only thing I know is that you will need msi afterburner.
