Do you overclock your gpus? Edit fixed gramar

[xDiVolatilX]

That is why undervolting is the new overclocking! But no one seems to be aware of this in this thread

I undervolt the heck outta my cpus. I tend to stay away from undervolting my gpus because I don't have the time to troubleshoot stability as gpus are more sensitive. Which card have you undervolted? Are you just using software like precision or afterburner or are you full blow changing firmware/bios versions?

 

[oldmanbal]

I still overclock any component I can with every rig I build. When picking out components and deciding on new builds, I put a lot of thought into the overclocking potential of each part. Everything from temperature regulation to electricity delivery get carefully thought out to ensure the best possible results. Nowadays a lot of the components are already being pushed fairly close to their limits out of the box, and don't have the massive performance headroom that used to be fairly standard across the board. When I was a kid high end computers always seemed prohibitively expensive and unlocking any more performance was one of the best feelings in the world. The in game difference between a well tuned rig and the stock settings was night and day. I remember one particular rig that was so loud due to the high CFM fans that everyone would ask me if my computer was broken when they came over for parties and I used it to play music. I can't say I miss the vaccuum cleaner audio profile from maxing out the fan controllers.

Nowadays I've learned to appreciate a quiet rig, under water, that still delivers the most I can pull from every component. Control software has come so far that you can silently sip power and scale everything back when doing the basics. One click and your machine is transformed into wanton wrath.

More than anything else, when I put a new rig together, I always look forwards to spending a day or two tweaking and tuning every component to learn both how far you can push them, and what the least amount of energy is they can get by with. Undervolting hardware nowadays can be more exciting than overclocking in many scenarios. Videocards have become particularly fascinating to undervolt and see how low you can go while still maintaining target performance. Nowadays there's so much that goes into gpu voltage regulation and clock speeds that a lot of the control has been taken out of our hands. However the great equalizer - temperature - still takes precedent in determining how hard you can push a gpu. When that's not enough, using unlocked bios with massive power profiles never fails.

It will be interesting for sure to see how they last. Afaik der8auer is running AMD CPUs 24/7 for 6 months to see how they hold up and I believe he is closing in on 6 months now. He did OC and temp tests before letting them run and is planning to redo the tests when the timeperiod has expired. That should give us some indication on how they hold up.

The 5800x is a hot running CPU though. My sample will boost to 4.6ghz on stock settings in cinebench, but even with high end cooling it is around 70 degrees at stable state (aprox 47 degrees above ambient). While most games run much cooler, there are a few that run quite a bit hotter (typically COD and similar).

Yeah the 5600x that I have runs substantially hotter than 2 different 3600s I've built rigs and played around with. No matter how much i scale back the vcore, it just never gets down to temperatures I'm used to seeing on the previous ryzen chips. I also see the chip pulling more watts at identical settings to a 3600 I have in my sons rig after testing 3 different scenarios for power and speed. The only part that really bother me is the idle temps. Even under water they never quite get down to what I'm used to seeing a cpu idle at. While it's not ideal, it's a tradeoff for having that extra boost in performance from the new design.

I'm really looking forward to what they're going to release based off the demo Lisa Su gave where they stacked another layer of L3 cache on top of the chip. Since they were going to be going with a new pin layout, all the current boards would have only had the 5xxx series as the highest performant part. If they release a tier above that which incorporates the L3 stacking and any other manufacturing improvements, it could offer another upgrade option for all the performance nuts like me that can never get enough. Additionally anything AMD learns from design and manufacture of those stacked chips will translate into the next generation of Ryzen cpus. For those that missed the demo, here's an article about it: AMD 3D Chiplet Stacking

 

[philb2]

I still overclock any component I can with every rig I build. When picking out components and deciding on new builds, I put a lot of thought into the overclocking potential of each part. Everything from temperature regulation to electricity delivery get carefully thought out to ensure the best possible results. Nowadays a lot of the components are already being pushed fairly close to their limits out of the box, and don't have the massive performance headroom that used to be fairly standard across the board. When I was a kid high end computers always seemed prohibitively expensive and unlocking any more performance was one of the best feelings in the world. The in game difference between a well tuned rig and the stock settings was night and day. I remember one particular rig that was so loud due to the high CFM fans that everyone would ask me if my computer was broken when they came over for parties and I used it to play music. I can't say I miss the vaccuum cleaner audio profile from maxing out the fan controllers.

Nowadays I've learned to appreciate a quiet rig, under water, that still delivers the most I can pull from every component. Control software has come so far that you can silently sip power and scale everything back when doing the basics. One click and your machine is transformed into wanton wrath.

More than anything else, when I put a new rig together, I always look forwards to spending a day or two tweaking and tuning every component to learn both how far you can push them, and what the least amount of energy is they can get by with. Undervolting hardware nowadays can be more exciting than overclocking in many scenarios. Videocards have become particularly fascinating to undervolt and see how low you can go while still maintaining target performance. Nowadays there's so much that goes into gpu voltage regulation and clock speeds that a lot of the control has been taken out of our hands. However the great equalizer - temperature - still takes precedent in determining how hard you can push a gpu. When that's not enough, using unlocked bios with massive power profiles never fails.


Yeah the 5600x that I have runs substantially hotter than 2 different 3600s I've built rigs and played around with. No matter how much i scale back the vcore, it just never gets down to temperatures I'm used to seeing on the previous ryzen chips. I also see the chip pulling more watts at identical settings to a 3600 I have in my sons rig after testing 3 different scenarios for power and speed. The only part that really bother me is the idle temps. Even under water they never quite get down to what I'm used to seeing a cpu idle at. While it's not ideal, it's a tradeoff for having that extra boost in performance from the new design.

I'm really looking forward to what they're going to release based off the demo Lisa Su gave where they stacked another layer of L3 cache on top of the chip. Since they were going to be going with a new pin layout, all the current boards would have only had the 5xxx series as the highest performant part. If they release a tier above that which incorporates the L3 stacking and any other manufacturing improvements, it could offer another upgrade option for all the performance nuts like me that can never get enough. Additionally anything AMD learns from design and manufacture of those stacked chips will translate into the next generation of Ryzen cpus. For those that missed the demo, here's an article about it: AMD 3D Chiplet Stacking

oldmanbal I'm not the "performance nut" that you are, but I still recognize that this is a great post. Kudos.

 

[evhvis]

Yeah the 5600x that I have runs substantially hotter than 2 different 3600s I've built rigs and played around with. No matter how much i scale back the vcore, it just never gets down to temperatures I'm used to seeing on the previous ryzen chips. I also see the chip pulling more watts at identical settings to a 3600 I have in my sons rig after testing 3 different scenarios for power and speed. The only part that really bother me is the idle temps. Even under water they never quite get down to what I'm used to seeing a cpu idle at. While it's not ideal, it's a tradeoff for having that extra boost in performance from the new design.

Idle temps aren't bad on the 5000 parts when under water. E.g. my 5800x idles 3-5 degrees above ambient and my 5900x idles 4-7 degrees above ambient with fans setup for very low noise idle. The 1-3 degrees higher idle than some other CPUs shouldn't be an issue IMO. This is of course true idle, meaning no browsers or similar stuff running, a sensible amount of background services and water temp at stable state. Browsing etc. isn't idle as the CPU will use 70-150% more power when browsing compared to when the computer is idle.

 

[Filter]

not anymore the fun isnt there anymore. just let the software do it for you.

 

[Koldur]

I undervolt the heck outta my cpus. I tend to stay away from undervolting my gpus because I don't have the time to troubleshoot stability as gpus are more sensitive. Which card have you undervolted? Are you just using software like precision or afterburner or are you full blow changing firmware/bios versions?

I undervolted my Zotac 3080, which wasn't done in a day, but after a couple of days got the right setting. The trick is, do not undervolt as low as you think you can. Every bit counts, which might not be 100s of mV's, but every little step is a step which brings you extra fps.

Thought I had succes after having done a few 3D Mark passes, but Half Life Alyx had issues I blamed the game for, but later found out it was the undervolt. So I upped the voltage bit by bit and found the right undervolt. Effective time I spent on it, was about 4 hours, but the boost clocks are way more reliable now and especially at the times it counts, I get the extra fps I need for smooth VR.

 

[xDiVolatilX]

I undervolted my Zotac 3080, which wasn't done in a day, but after a couple of days got the right setting. The trick is, do not undervolt as low as you think you can. Every bit counts, which might not be 100s of mV's, but every little step is a step which brings you extra fps.

Thought I had succes after having done a few 3D Mark passes, but Half Life Alyx had issues I blamed the game for, but later found out it was the undervolt. So I upped the voltage bit by bit and found the right undervolt. Effective time I spent on it, was about 4 hours, but the boost clocks are way more reliable now and especially at the times it counts, I get the extra fps I need for smooth VR.

Good thing you got it squared away so you're not chasing your tail in circles, that can be troublesome sometimes. Which program do you use to tweak the voltage? Did it require a bios or firmware update?

 

[cybereality]

I mess around with overclocking here and there, but honestly I rarely see any tangible gains. Yeah, maybe you get a slightly better score in 3DMark, but you can get nothing in real games and sometimes you get worse performance (or introduce stability issues).

However, I do like Radeon Chill on AMD. It is designed to slow the card down to a target FPS range. However, I found it makes games smoother because it will reduce the load when not needed (like if you are just looking at the sky) and then you have the boost performance when it really matters.

 

[Koldur]

Good thing you got it squared away so you're not chasing your tail in circles, that can be troublesome sometimes. Which program do you use to tweak the voltage? Did it require a bios or firmware update?

Sorry, forgot to mention, I use MSI afterburner, it sets the right curve as well for the other clockspeeds as well. Just default BIOS, not going to mess around with that.

I guess you could get more out of it if you manually tweak all ranges, but that is not something I want to spend my time on haha. I did set a somewhat lower speed than the maximum possible, but that was just for the records anyways. Normally most cards cannot use the highest boosts because of power limits.

That is what is getting a huge oversight with these cards, clockspeeds do not matter much if they cannot be maintained most of the time.

 

[daglesj]

I undervolted mine a few days ago as I rarely push it. Seems to work fine. 6700XT.

 

[JSHamlet234]

Overclocked with an undervolted curve. The 3 top bins get a little more voltage than the stock BIOS allowed.

 

[lobstar]

FF14 always shit itself out with graphics overclocks for whatever reason so I stopped bothering, my GTX 570 I had to actually underclock its factory OC. Only that game too, never had issues with anything else lol.

There is a FF14 benchmark now. I've been running it tonight and seeing what it will cooperate with. If the bench is anything like the game it seems much more kind to overclocking now.

 

[D-EJ915]

There is a FF14 benchmark now. I've been running it tonight and seeing what it will cooperate with. If the bench is anything like the game it seems much more kind to overclocking now.

Yeah I'm not sure if it had a dx11 version at the time.