This is where graphics card undervoltage comes in, which involves lowering the voltage at which a graphics card’s GPU operates, while trying to maintain a certain level of performance. In this tutorial we will explain how to undervoltage NVIDIA GPUs without losing performance, which will be of great interest to you, especially due to the increase in the price of electricity in Europe.
Many PCs do not have optimal cooling for the graphics card
In many towers, the graphics card is usually placed very close to the power supply, this reduces air circulation inside the case of our PC. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the heat emitted by the graphics card and this is where the undervoltage of an NVIDIA GPU can help us reduce said temperature. Especially in its high-end models and the situation will worsen in the future with the appearance of the RTX 40 and models with a TDP close to 600 W.
Here’s How Undervoltage Affects the Boost of an NVIDIA GPU
We also can’t forget Boost, which is to temporarily set the GPU to a higher clock speed for a very short period of time. As soon as the temperature reaches certain safety limits, it gradually drops. Undervoltage on some NVIDIA GPU models and architectures can mean that MHz boosts last longer than they usually do, partly due to the fact that at lower power draws comes less temperature.
This ends up causing a less curious effect and that is that thanks to the possibility of reaching the Boost periods longer, we can see that a GPU with undervoltage achieves a higher overall performance when moving games, render a scene in Blender or any other application where the raw power of the graphics card is used.
Tools we will need
First, we recommend that you take a pencil and paper to write down the different results in an orderly fashion. You can also do this in a spreadsheet on your main computer or tablet. In any case, in order to collect the information in an orderly way, we recommend that you use what suits you best.
The next thing we’ll need is a bunch of monitoring software to see what “vital” constants in our NVIDIA graphics we’re going to be underestimating. Among them, we highlight, on the one hand, GPU-Z who will give us the information chart specifications every moment. And on the other side, HWiINFO64which will give us the information detected by the sensors integrated in the GPU which measure Temperature
Because graphics cards have mechanisms to lower the clock speed when there is not much workload, it is essential perform GPU-intensive benchmarks able to take. So, after performing the undervolt, it is recommended to use a cue such as those included in 3DMark which make the graphics card work with its maximum effort.
By the way, after running each test and writing down the results. do not forget reset to HWiNFO64this is obtained by giving to the clock icon at the bottom of the window after running each performance test. This way you can decide which voltage is best for your activity.
How to undervolt an NVIDIA GPU?
To start, don’t worry, since you won’t have to mess anything up, we’ll do it via MSI’s Afterburner software. Since this is going to give us the curve of clock speeds against voltage in millivolts. To access it, just press CTRL + F simultaneously and a window like the one in the image above will appear.
There we will see the different basic clock speeds that can be achieved and the voltages that are required there. Therefore, to perform the automatic adjustment, we will only have to click on the part of the curve that interests us and the speed will be adjusted immediately. However, what we want is to separate the voltage from the frequency. How can we do it? Well, it is simple and you just need to perform the following steps.
- Press L at the maximum voltage you want the graphics card to have to lock it.
- For any voltages above the selected one, you just need to move them and place them below the clock speed that gets the voltage we locked to.
- Return to the main Afterburner advantage and make the appropriate changes take effect.
- Once done, remember to unlock the voltage by pressing L again when you have selected the maximum voltage. This is essential if your processor does not have an integrated graphics and you use the dedicated one to move around Windows windows.
You see testing the different voltage levels by doing the 3Dmark benchmarks we mentioned earlier. Note the result of these as well as the power obtained thanks to HWiNFO64. With that, you should have enough to choose the ideal voltage for your NVIDIA graphics card.
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