AMD PowerColor Red Devil RX 6950 XT - Overclocking vs Undervolting

foreign [Music] PC Jack now the rx6950 XT in itself is a really powerful rdna2 card and possibly one of the highlights of the previous generation of gpus and it even went toe-to-toe the RTX 1390 and the 1390 ti so nowadays you could probably pick up one of these for quite a decent deal right now compared to the current generation of gpus for both AMD and Nvidia but what I wanted to go through today is exactly how well my car performs specifically when it comes to some performance tweaking for overclocks and undervolts so today's video we're going to see exactly how well my car performs when we overclock and undervolt it and we'll test out in a couple of my favorite games as well so of course before we get into any sort of overclocking or undervolting the first thing we're gonna have to do is establish a baseline so what we're going to do is we're going to use unigen Heaven 4.0 and go through a couple of rounds of benchmarking to see what kind of performance we gain at stock and then we'll start messing around with our overclocks testing them in unison heaven and then once we reach the final clock for our GPU we'll then compare the scoring Unison having 4.0 compared to our Baseline score and then we'll take things further with testing in a couple of games as well so we've got our first score in our stock testing and so far we got for our FPS 196.9 and our score is 4959 additionally while running this Benchmark I've also had GPU Z running just so we can see exactly how well our card is performing at stock so for our GPU clock you can see we're floating around the sort of 2600 near 2650 Mark and if our memory clock we're sitting at 2238 megahertz and our GPU temp does look in not bad all things considered we're sort of sitting in the mid 60s which is absolutely fine but potentially with some underbolt we could even reduce that a little bit more in regards to our GPU power draw we're currently drawing just over 300 watts about 325 so I reckon we could potentially drop that a little bit with Amanda Bolton as well but additionally with some overclocking we could increase that power limit and we may see a little bit more of a higher power drill but if shouldn't be anything too drastic and as you can see from voltage the GPU sits at around 1.15 volts uh I reckon we can probably reduce that as well by a significant margin and still maintain decent performance so what we'll do we'll start getting some actual overclocking and then we'll get back to benchmarking and see how well we're improving performance in Union Heaven 4.0 so to actually do some overclocking you can use MSI afterburner but for AMD views I quite like using the adrenaline driver in order to do mine so what we're going to do we're going to go in and we're going to start pumping up the core clock speed first and taking it from there so all we're going to want to do is click on custom and go GPU tuning select Advanced control and generally what I like to do when I'm setting my call voltage is you should keep a sort of 100 megahertz between your minimum and your maximum frequency and that should help with stability so all we're going to do we're going to go about 10 15 megahertz up at a time we'll go for 10 just to be modest so let's start with a very basic one let's go for let's go 2730 which would mean we want our minimum frequency to be 26.30 and while we're in here we're just going to enable all of this stuff just so we've got it all ready to go because we can take a look at all this afterwards the other thing as well we'll do we're going to max out our power limit so we're gonna go back into Uniontown 4.0 and test this out and see how we're looking and so we've been throughout the first Benchmark pass with our very tiny overclock and you can see there is a very slight Improvement and it was stable so thing that I'm going to do now is just go all the way through and push my overclock as much as I can and once I've reached my final score on settings I'll get back to you okay so I think we've reached our final overclock for our core clock specifically and after running through our benchmarks we're now at 205.8 for our FBS and our score has gone up to 5184 now we did start at 196.9 for our FPS and then 4959 for our score so there has been a bit of a boost and the settings I've used to actually get to that is I've set my core clock to 2825 which gets me to around just 27.75 2780 megahertz in application so that's about where I would expect and uh I'm quite happy with it as is at the moment as you can see from GPU Zu it has pushed up our power usage quite a lot during The Benchmark and I've noticed that we're sitting around the saw 360 to 380 Watts range at times which is quite a lot and it is increasing the actual noise from RGB and you see it's running around 77 which is pretty Audible and um it may be picked up on the microphone so what we're going to do now we're going to move on to our memory clock next and see how far we can push that but first impressions I don't know if I'd be particularly happy running it at this sort of level of performance depending what it's like in game most notably because of the actual noise levels and personally I would rather run cooler and quieter but that's the whole point of today we're experimenting and trying to see exactly how well this card overclocks but of course we will move on to own the vault in pretty soon okay so moving on to our memory tuning we're just basically go back into the adrenaline driver and go down to vram tuning and enable that and we're also going to enable Advanced control and I think on this again what you want to do is push about 10 megahertz at a time saying what you could do you could go in here and go for 22 58 test that save a stable and then move on I'm going to work my way through now and see what's stable for me and then I'll get back to you on that okay so I think I've reached what I would say is my final overclock with the 6950 XT and I've managed to push my memory up to around 2 400 megahertz which in application sits about 15 megahertz below that so as you've seen here we're currently around 23 86 the 2390 tends to fluctuate a little bit but it's just below that 2400 megahertz Mark just like how it is when we're overclocking our call clock and you can see on here we've got our FPS up to 209.2 and our score up to five to six and nine so even overclocking on memory does give us a little bit of a boost to be fair so overall this overclock is giving us some better performance in using Heaven 4.0 we are gonna have to test it in the games that I played to see whether it's stable in those as well because it could vary from application to application but before we do that instead we're gonna roll back and we're gonna start getting some undervolting instead see what sort of performance we can get more so in regards to our power but we can maintain our stock performance while using less power that could be something that's pretty useful to have so for our undervalding instead what we're going to do is try and maintain our stock core clock and also drop the voltage as well and see just how far we get until we reach instability so with our stock settings our GPU was sort of hit in the rough 2600 megahertz Mark which will set as a static amount in here just to make things a little bit more stable so we're going to drop this down from 2719 to 2600 and then again like we did with our overclock we're gonna make this 100 megahertz less and go for 2500. all we're going to do next then is again we're going to increase our power limit not necessarily to increase the power going to the card but it should help us with the stability for our undervolt so we're going to increase that as well but now we're going to start playing with the actual voltage for our GPU so as you can see at stock it's set to 1200 Max we're gonna actually drop this down but again about 10 millivolts at a time like you would on your call clock for your megahertz and until we start seeing some instability and maybe crashing and using heaven we will know that's where the sweet spot is so for now we're going to drop this down like I said on here let's go for 11.90 and we can apply that and then we'll go back into units in heaven and start going through some tests and as you can see our call clock hasn't really changed too much just by dropped down by about 50 megahertz or so it's not a drastic amount we could potentially boost that up a little bit for the but for the sake of today's video we're going to set it to that because it's not going to cause too much or loss to Performance and even from doing that tiny little bit of undervolting you can see we're drawing a little less than what we would stock which was sitting around the soil 320 watt range as you see now sort of 290s below around that sort of level so we're gonna go through I'm gonna see just how far I can push there as well as how much it's going to reduce our power usage and see if we're maintaining a performance and we'll take it from there okay so I think we found the sweet spot for our undervolting I did manage to drop the voltage down to 1050 millivolts but I've started to see some artifacting so I bumped it back up a little bit to 1070 millivolts and things seem to be pretty stable all in all and as you see in gpu-z it actually shows there's been a little lower at 0.993 volts so again we do see a bit of a Delta between the overclocking software and gpu-z so seems to be a pretty decent result compared to what we're at a 1.2 volts now you may be looking at temperatures and thinking it doesn't look too drastically different to what it was a stock but the thing to note is that our fan speed is quite low I haven't done any custom fan curves so this is just going off the stock settings for the fan and the system is really quiet but what is most impressive is take a look at our GPU power draw which as you can see has gone from around 320 Watts all the way down to 240 250 Watts range which is a very impressive decrease to our power and I don't have the score upper here right now but the score was around 193 for our FPS and I put up the score in a screenshot but but the performance difference shouldn't be that noticeable in games and for the benefits again with reduced power and reduced noise levels it seems like a worthwhile option to experiment with so so now we have both our overclock and our undervolts figured out what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into a couple of my favorite games test them out and see if they're stable in game and see what performance difference we can see compared to stock and also where it's worth going for the overclock or the undervolt in game I'm not going to test all these uh 1080p all the way up to 4K instead what I'll do I'll just test it at my native monitors resolution 1440p which should still give us a decent overview of what the performance difference is like if you are looking for a more thorough detailed review of the 6950xd specifically the Red Devil model I'll link my friend Jerry's review down in the video description as he's done a much more thorough job of reviewing the card and looking at multiple resolutions so highly recommend checking his video but for today but you can see how it runs for me in my personal system and see whether it's worthwhile for you guys [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] so before we get into the results one thing that's worth highlighting is that I actually did have to bump up the voltage a little bit on my undervolt I was trying to push 1070 millivolts but my games just kept crashing so I had to pump it up a little bit more up to 1100 millivolts and it was Rock Solid after that and the power draw was roughly about the same at around 250 Watts Max now look at the results there are certain gains from an overclock but mostly I was more impressed with the actual performance maintained with the undervolt which also resulted in less power and also lower noise levels now even if you did want to push this car for the absolute limit the one thing I wasn't very keen on was the fact that the coil wine on my card in particular is pretty noticeable and also once we pump up that power draw our fans are starting to ramp up pretty heavily and the noise is very noticeable of course you may wear headphones which could avoid this issue but if you like me and you like to use speakers from time to time it would be a bit of an issue but I have to say I am really address with how much performance this card can maintain even with a really mild undervolt and if I'm being totally honest I'm actually leaning more towards using that undervolt than the overclock daily for my system so I think I'm going to run with that undervolt at 2600 megahertz and 1100 millivolts and we'll see how I get on I'll have to test it in a couple of other games as well the games I've shown off today aren't the only games I play so it's very important that you verify the actual performance and stability of your oval clocks and undervolts in multiple games so I would highly recommend testing it in a lot more than what I've done today but either way I thought it was a pretty fun experiment to try out and uh it's nice to get back into some overclocking on the channel as it's been quite a while so uh so let me know what you think of the rx6950 XT and it's overclocking and undevolting performance down in the comments below if you enjoyed this video then please feel free to like And subscribe for more videos on the way soon you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram pcjack94 if you liked all more myself another like-minded Harper and fuses maybe check out the PC Jack Discord server if you like the sport Channel even further though then make sure to check out the channel memberships you can claim exclusive perks like early access to videos including my dedicated undervolting and overclocking tutorial for this card so feel free to check it out you'll find us all those in the video description thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: PC Jack

Views: 24,076

Keywords: powercolor red devil radeon rx 6950 xt, powercolor liquid devil amd radeon rx 6950 xt, powercolor red devil rx 6950xt 1080p gaming benchmarks, powercolor red devil rx 6950xt overclocking, powercolor red devil rx 6950xt gaming performance, powercolor red devil rx 6950xt overclock or undervolt, powercolor red devil rx 6950xt review, rx 6950xt oc vs uv, red devil rx 6950 xt, how to overclock rx 6950 xt, best rdna 2 gpu, radeon adrenaline overclocking, how to overclock using adrenaline

Id: Fp4_YjFZGfg

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023