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Undervolt my RTX 3090
I was inspired by my high altitude build in the other thread and as the AZ summer kicks in I thought I should do the same thing to try to control temps on my Nvidia RTX 3090FE.
Default advertised boost clocks are much lower but it seemed to be running at 1750 to 1950MHz under load and about 930 to 980mv drawing about 350W which is advertised TDP.
Used MSI Afterbuner and applied a curve maxing out the CPU at 1850MHz and the voltage at 850mv.
The result is that under load the speed is locked in at 1850MHz and 850mv and draws about 310W under load with slightly higher benchmarks. It's also running about 10C cooler across all metrics with CPU temp holding about 60C in my system and no throttling ever.
I didn't spend a lot of time trying to find the limits of how far I could go but I've been playing BBF2042 and it's totally stable.
Undervolting is low risk because instability is not going to damage the card and can be easily corrected if you go too low. It also has the effect of keeping other components in the system just a bit cooler and saves on your air conditioning bill as well as saving you 30-40 Watts of power draw on your system. Increases lifespan of components as well.
I can't believe I didn't do this sooner but undervolting is a more recent form of overclocking as a means of managing thermals to improve performance by reducing throttling. I could instead overclock to improve performance but it's a already a 3090! This card needs to last.
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Lookup optimum tech on youtube. He has some undervolting tutorials on nvidia cards. You'll get more from his settings and won't need to underclock. It's super simple too.
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Interesting. I've never considered undervolting my 3090Ti. Thanks for the link!
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1 Attachment(s)
Here's a screenshot of MSI Afterburner showing my speeds and temps while playing BF2042. Note how cool the 3090FE is running with 90+% utilization and no clock fluctuations. Look at the energy usage well below the 350W TDP. CPU also staying cool.
https://dapsecure.info/VV00dy/MSI_AB.png
You can view it here as well: https://dapsecure.info/VV00dy/MSI_AB.png
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Question - do you ever run into issues with games crashing to desktop when undervolting? This seems to be the case (for me, at least) when running the "Balanced" power profile within Windows. If running on either High Performance, Ultimate Performance or any custom Ryzen power plans, never have crash to desktop issues when undervolting.
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I can't see the temps in the picture. What temps do you see?
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That's "cool" enough. Usually there are multiple temp sensors for the card. The average for the GPU die itself, the GPU die hot-spot and then the DRAM.
The average GPU could be fine at 58C and the DRAM is overheated.
Check with AIDA64 or something like that.