How (and why) you should undervolt your GPU - A step by step guide (Deep Learning/Gaming/Mining)

in this video i'm gonna go through the exact steps on how you would undervolt your gpu but sort of for those of you who are like what what is unrevolting i better explain uh what that is or sort of why we would do that in the first place so why undervolt and uh basically you know i guess there are multiple reasons but what it really boils down to in my opinion is that you'll have sort of much and i guess much should be in parenthesis much better temperatures so so i guess this depends on your specific card and sort of the the silicon lottery but in general you will have much better temperatures and uh and you know so why would you want better temperatures i guess you know it's better so the card will have a better longevity and i guess for the case of you know laptops and stuff you would have better better battery and stuff like that and uh i guess the second point is that you'll have a better uh performance and so i mean this is kind of a counterintuitive thing but in in many cases when you if you run into very hot temperatures then the card will thermal throttle and so it will decrease the clock speeds of the card and then it will lower the performance but if you sort of prevent it from thermal throttling because you'll have better temperatures then you'll have better performance so i guess this is kind of counterintuitive but that's you know in many cases what you can observe so to me uh undervolting seems to be a pretty clear thing to do um especially if you care about the temperatures of the card and uh yeah i mean i haven't i can't see any um any drawbacks or any negatives of doing it uh it won't hurt the card uh in fact you know you can argue that it's gonna be better for the card running at lower um lower voltages and then sort of decrease temperatures right so before we go through the exact steps let me sort of bring up the terminology so what is undervolting uh well undervolting is uh i guess sort of decreasing voltage but maintaining clock speed so maintaining maintaining clock speed so uh basically you know you'll you'll still have the same performance but you'll try to decrease the voltage that the card receives um so you know in other words you'll basically have a lower power consumption but you'll have the same performance underclocking on the other hand is decreasing you know uh the clock speed so it's you know flat out reducing the performance of the card uh in many cases you can do a combination of these where you can undervolt you can decrease the voltage and you can decrease the clock speeds um and it that kind of depends on you know how what your temperatures are uh maybe you want to reduce fan noise or something like that but yeah those are sort of the two things that is important to keep in mind all right so now that we understand that let's go through the steps so what are the steps that we need to do to undervolt a card uh so the first uh is to run uh i guess install and run msi afterburner so there's going to be link in the description where you can download that but when you have downloaded it it's going to look like this so basically you can see some information like the clock speed the current clock speed you can see sort of uh power limits temperature limits before it starts thermal thermal throttling and then you have the core clock at the clock speed sort of um basically if you want to overclock or underclock and then the memory clock and then the fan speed and then here you can also see the temperature but what we're going to go through and look at in this video is uh pressing this thing right here so when you press this thing right here this sort of graph is going to pop up you can also do control f if for some reason clicking there doesn't work so what you will see here is sort of a frequency and voltage curve where y is the frequency curve and x axis is the voltage so we're going to go through that a little bit more later on but just install this for now and then also install and run a unigene heaven benchmark there's going to be a link in the description for that as well um basically this is to sort of test the stability of your pc and basically check what the performance is so yeah when you've installed that we're basically going to run it so after we run this unit benchmark we're going to keep track of the or take note of the highest temperature and then also the clock speed of the card so those are sort of the two main things and uh then we can compare after the undervolt and before the underbolt so yeah let me just run this all right so basically um hopefully it won't lag too much because i'm recording at the same time but basically we're going to press this benchmark and then we'll have msi afterburner here and the things we will look at is the core clock speed so right now i can see that it's about around 1900 you can also see it here so it's about 1900 and it's running at a over 1000 micro volt but so what we're looking for is basically what is the clock speed so now it's decreasing a little bit and what are the temperatures of the card so one thing that's pretty interesting is that now it's over 80 degrees celsius and you can sort of start to see that the the frequency the clock speed of the card is decreasing a little bit from what it was in the beginning and this is a common thing that the clock speeds will decrease as your temperatures run hot so now it's even clearer it's 82 degrees and it's almost 1830 megahertz 1820 so you know it's almost 100 megahertz difference and now it's actually thermal throttling pretty bad so it's less than 1800 megahertz now which is quite a big difference all right so after running the benchmark the clock speeds so let's see what were the clock speeds so highest temperature was 82 degrees which is just below the the temperature for where you uh sort of thermal throttle and i think it was thermal throttling just a little bit because the the megahertz or the clock speed of the car was decreasing quite a bit but the clock speed of the card was um around you know 1800 to maybe 1900 i guess it you know it's not important to get the exact megahertz um but let's just take 1850 that seems to be a a nice number so that's the clock speed of the card and the highest temperature was 82. all right so when we've done that uh we have something to refer to and something to compare to so uh what we want to do now this sort of these steps of unrevolting so we will start with the microvolt of 950 and we will maintain that 1850 clock speed and then uh sort of decrease in increments of 25 micro volts so you know we're gonna go down to 925 900 875 etc and we're basically going to see when does the computer crash or when does it crash so when it crashes uh plus 25 microvolts to that limit and that's sort of the the microvolts that you'll use uh and uh in the beginning i was kind of like no uh if it's crap if it's gonna crash then it's gonna my computer is gonna break uh but that's not the case there's nothing you know that's inherently dangerous with the the the gpu crashing um just it's going to restart and it's going to work again so no problem don't worry about it so anyways we're going to start with a microvolt of 950 and then we're going to decrease in increments of 25 so you know how do we do this well we basically go to that thing right there or we or control f so we get this frequency um this voltage frequency curve so the first thing you're going to do is you're going to click on this um this core clock speed and you're going to write minus 250 and then you're going to press this button right here to apply it so basically now we've underclocked the card right so now we've reduced the performance of the card and the reason why we want to do this is because uh we're basically going to take this 950 and then we're going to drag it up to what was it 1850 so you can press shift and then down arrow to go down to that exact number so 1850 and then you're going to press apply now over uh that 950 they're all going to maintain the same clock speed which is 1850 that we set it to so don't bother about this at the end uh you can use you can i guess you can you can push this down but um yeah it doesn't matter really it's never going to run at that micro volt anyways but so what you would do now is you would rerun the test you would make sure that everything is working okay so there's no crashes and stuff and you know this is a pretty safe way um sort of a microvolt to start with so i think this is it's pretty guaranteed to run okay and then you'll decrease it so what you'll do then is you press right here you do zero and then you press uh no wait zero and then you press apply so basically now and you will uh you will go back to the same curve that you had in the beginning you will do the same thing minus 250 and then you will go to 925 and you'll do the same thing 1850 and then okay and then you'll run the test so it's a little bit tedious but that this is a safe way to do it i've already tried this and checked it out and so what my what mine is is i'm going to do minus 250 and i'm going to go to 850 and i'm going to go to 1850 and i'm gonna press apply so this is a very safe one for me i know that this works so what i'm gonna do is uh just run the test at this clock speed and we're gonna or this unrevolt and we're to see what the performance is now i guess also technically we are under clocking a little bit because the clock speed in the beginning was 1900 right so i guess this is a combination there's an undervolt and there's a slight um under clock as well but um yeah it's very minor so what we're going to do is we're going to bring up the test again and we're going to run it to see what we get oh and also you should have also um kept track of the the score i think i remember to be 2004 uh we have it on video but i think it was 2004 so just keep note of that because we're gonna compare it to what we get now so as you can see already the temperature are much much better right 71 degrees compared to 83 degrees that we got before so interestingly the score decreased a little bit so after undervolt scored 1983 and then um the highest temperature was 73 degrees so let's just bring out the calculator so it's let me close this as well so the let's see the difference is 1983 divided by 2004 so i guess it's a um about you know one percent improv version improvement so one percent performance uh degradation and i guess i don't know about 10 degrees uh better temperature so 10 degrees better temperature and you know to me that's a that's a wonderful trade-off you know to have that much better temperatures and basically having it to the point of thermal traveling before but now uh you know within very safe temperature all right so the test i did this on by the way was a gtx 1060 um and uh you know i've done this on the other so i have two gpus the other gpus at rtx 3090 i've done the same thing on that one and it leads to similar performance benef sort of temperature benefits um and it's uh a lot quieter as well which is really nice and hopefully uh you now know exactly how you go about doing it and uh anyways thank you so much for watching the video and like the video if you thought it was useful and i'll see you next time

Channel: Aladdin Persson

Views: 176,363

Rating: 4.8987155 out of 5

Keywords: undervolt gpu tutorial 2021, nvidia gpu undervolt underclock tutorial, undervolt gpu nvidia deep learning, underclock gpu nvidia deep learning

Id: I9K4PSqxoYg

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021