This GPU is HOT. Let's fix it for free! (and make it faster while saving you money on electricity)

so i recently just got this reference model 6700 xt for msrp which was really exciting i've tested it out even put it up against the rog strix rtx 3060 which has an insane cooler model and you know the cooler model on this reference card is well i mean less robust and we saw some temperatures that weren't really necessarily a cause for concern but they're a bit higher than what you see on a lot of aib coolers but what can we do about that so what i'd like to look at in this video is under volting in order to control the temperatures but since we're already going to be playing around in the radeon control panel to undervolt we might as well do some other performance tuning as well i think we should look at overclocking it as well as tuning the memory we'll also look at those separated so we'll look at what if we just undervolt it what does that do and then we'll also look at what if we undervolt it with tweaking the memory speeds and then what if we also add in a full on core overclock as well and we'll look at some side by side comparisons now it's going to be really important if you're following along at home to understand that not every gpu even if you buy a reference model rx 6700 xt there is no guarantees that you will be able to achieve stable overclocks or under volts at the exact same numbers that i do so you can't just go ahead and copy them however if you want my short version of an overclocking guide generally you can kind of just google what other people got on your gpu and that's a starting point it might give you an idea of because okay the nice way to overclock let's just go ahead and open up the dang program and i'll talk to you about it there okay so boom first of all on amd gpus you can just use their their driver software from the home tab you want to click on the by the way this is what it looks like on the current drivers as of filming 22.3.2 if you are on a different driver version things might look slightly different but anyway so if you click on the performance tab you then want to click on the tuning tab and under the tuning tab what it currently looks like is this they've kind of put the cpu in here as well i think it used to not have that or i don't remember being there but anyway the point is you want to change the tuning to manual now you can click that here but then you're going to have to click it down here anyway so on your gpu tuning we want to go to manual tuning and we want to make it custom now in here you've got a whole bunch of stuff you'll notice i do have smart access memory enabled and in general i'm going to do that but you might not be able to because you might not be on a compatible cpu or motherboard and so that's a whole other topic i've done videos on that but anyway i do have smart access memory enabled you may or may not be able to but we want to click all these little buttons are those called radio dials i don't know but the point is click all the buttons we want to do gpu tuning and we want to have advanced control over it that gives us the actual numbers if you don't have the advanced control it sets it more in terms of percentages i'd rather know the actual numbers maybe you think differently um and we'll also want control over the vram tuning and we will also want well you might want control over the fan tuning that's kind of up to you and then power tuning as well now power tuning i'm going to recommend you slide this as far to the right as your gpu can do because this doesn't mean your gpu will draw more power it just means you are giving it permission to draw more power if that's going to help it improve its performance and so i don't see any really downside as far as i know to just allowing your gpu to access more power if it wants to okay so i'm going to slide that all the way to the right and i've never had any issues doing that now not every model of even 6700 xt will have 15 limit different models could have different limits set by the aib is my understanding now let's go ahead and take a look first of all we want to just look into an under volt now how do you interval like i said the first thing i actually recommend doing is just seeing what other people were able to achieve stably and using that as a starting point because if you're going to do it yourself carefully you should honestly pull it down like 10 millivolt i think it's millivolts and then you should run a test of some kind you would apply changes so it actually kicks in and then you would run a game play around in a game for a bit run some kind of intense benchmark application this even has a built-in stress tester you'd want to see if it's stable and then you go down another maybe like 10. but here's the thing if you just google what other people got stable i mean you're watching my video right now but if you're on a different gpu and you're interested in doing this just google what somebody else did and where they were stable and start there and if you're not stable then go back up give it more power again if you are stable where they were able to push it you could try going further so you could go down to like 1090 if they were stable at 1100. now honestly i'll admit right now and give a shout out i googled what other people got on their 6700 xt to get a baseline starting point i pulled up a video from ancient gameplays i think a couple of his other ones have popped up on my channel uh i'm sorry i'm not on my channel but i'm on youtube recommendations before it seems like he has a lot of good amd benchmark not benchmark well maybe benchmarking but um looks like overclocking and under volting content so that'd be a good place to look if you're on a uh looking to do that on a radeon gpu it's like a hair in my eye or something guys anyway he was stable at 1100. i tried it out um i was stable i went a little bit further and it seemed stable but then when i switched to red dead redemption 2 it was not able to complete the benchmark uh when i went much lower than this so i went back to 1100 it seemed stable at like 10.70 um but then like i said so sometimes it's stable in one game but not another which is just as a side note you can actually set different overclocks on a per game basis within this driver utility so if you find your stable in one game but not another but hey it's stable in that game at more aggressive settings you could go ahead and change this from global tuning and you could go into a per-game basis and do it that way so that's up to you anyway i'm gonna leave it 1100 so when you see my results where it's just the under volt that's it that's all i did i just went to 1100 and there we go okay but what if we want to also increase performance what can we do well one of the easiest things to do is on the vram tuning just increase the memory timings so it has default has fast timings that's all you've got here by going to the fast timings in a lot of games you are going to get better performance just with the fast timings but then you can also bump up the frequency and once again we have the advanced control where you can set it as an exact number rather than as a percentage now once again credit where it's due um i did try out these settings that were recommended over at ancient gameplays and they seemed good he had a good point which is if you set it a little bit higher there's kind of an offset in between where it actually sits and the number you type in here it seems to sometimes go a little bit below what you set so by jumping if you want it to be 2100 you actually type in something a bit bigger than 2100 and then it will actually be 2100 now i played around with this a bit and i didn't notice much benefit if any by going past this on my particular model and that's actually something i've noticed on overclocking other gpus i've had gpus in the past where it seemed stable pushing the memory crazy far i think this happened on my rtx 2070 and i could push the memory crazy far but then when i actually ran benchmarks they started getting slower so i don't know exactly why that happens i'm really this is not an overclocking focused channel i've never claimed to be an overclocking expert um but i i think you can be you want to be careful just because it's not crashing doesn't mean you're actually increasing performance so i'd recommend when you make some changes that you actually run some benchmarks and compare the numbers and make sure that your results are actually getting better not just that you're stable so when you look at my memory and under volt this is what i set it to okay now when we uh also want to overclock the core it looks like this card defaulted to a max frequency target of 2659 which is already pretty dang high but i decided to try targeting 2800 and then i have heard and i haven't actually done enough a b testing myself to know if this is true that setting the minimum frequency close to your max frequency can help the stability of the overclock maybe because your gpu is not swinging between such a wide range i don't know to be honest i've just heard that so maybe i'm just spreading useless misinformation but i'm at least tagging it as that's what i've heard guys anyway so when you look at my overclocked results these were my settings so it was targeting 2800 and trying not to fall below 2700 and i did have the under volt which is going to help rain in the temperatures despite the fact that pushing the overclock here and upping the power tuning could increase temperatures hopefully this kind of offsets those increases and i went ahead and left the fan speeds as they are by default but if you're finding it too loud or you wish it would actually go more aggressive maybe you're wearing some closed back headphones and you don't really care if your pc sounds like a jet engine you can get in here and just bump up the fan speed there's also advanced controls where you can set a fan curve so what you're basically doing here is i could i could pull these dots right and i can change them to where um we've got zero rpm so this is the temperature at which it would go above that right so it's got like that it's got 50 so basically i could increase the fan speed percentage at this temperature that's that's basically what those are controlling so at what temperature do i want what fan speed so i could get a lot more aggressive i could basically say i want it to stay quiet but as soon as it gets over a certain thing i just want it to like ramp up and these are can be some kind of personal preference things and you could look into more information on setting custom fan curves as you want what i went ahead and did on the on that was actually i just i just left it at the default so that's what you'll see in the testing now with all that being said let's go ahead and see some side-by-side comparisons of all of these and i'm doing it towards well you know let's just run the comparisons and and i'll tell you there all right let's run some benchmarks and we put them side by side and as usual don't mind if you hear my kids playing jumping around upstairs while i try to record this voiceover while their grandma's over to play anyway so what we're looking at here is first just with the undervolt now this is the 1100 millivolt setting and other than that everything is set exactly the same the game is running the 1440p max preset and all of that now i think it it's worthwhile to let this play out for a while to see if as the benchmark runs longer the temps stay down on the undervolt so far it's really looking good and notice that not only is it currently 10 degrees cooler look at the wattage it's actually drawing less power this is actually saving you money on your electric bill maybe not a mind-blowing amount but honestly considering this is the same gpu and basically delivering identical performance by the way i didn't change the fan speeds or anything so this is running at the same fan speed so we're drawing less power it's running much cooler so the fans might be running at a lower speed i didn't really notice a huge amount of fan noise either way again i game with headphones on i know not everybody does they're open back headphones but anyway the point is though that this is honestly really impressive we're um making a massive massive improvement to the gpu overall so i think that it's completely stable as far as i can tell as well which is the main concern you'd have with an undervolt is that it's stable and that you're also able to have your gpu boosting and performing as usual we're about to see the the end results here as he drives across the bridge but overall just watching the side by side i haven't seen any downside at all to this undervolt performance is basically identical the gpu is much cooler and literally saving you money drawing less power don't mind that little minimum thing there because this game's really picky on the minimums we didn't really see any dips in our frame time graph or anything like that but now let's take a look at running this with a memory overclock so we've got a plus 112 on our memory speeds and we've set it to the fast timings instead of the default timings now i don't think we need to run through the entire benchmark here but it's looking like our frame rate has jumped one or two fps it's nothing mind-blowing but what's cool here is notice that the gpu is cool hi it was actually not an intentional pun there but hey look at me go but what i'm getting at here is increasing the memory is not really dramatically increasing our power usage or the temperatures at least on the gpu itself i don't have anything set up to monitor the temps on the vram itself but you know the performance went up a little bit but what if we full on overclock this thing along with the undervolt now this is gonna be a personal preference thing i'm gonna be honest guys look at the power draw now instead of drawing less power we are drawing more power so i don't know whether it obeys the undervolt or not it is actually running a little bit cooler so i think it is utilizing the undervolt so even with the um clock speeds pushed all the way up to 2800 and you know i'm still running all the memory stuff we bumped the power limit up and all of that so this is increasing performance it's staying a bit cooler this is faster and cooler but it is drawing a little bit more power so that's going to be the big downside here and while it's cooler than the stock settings this is not as cool as the um just the under volt settings or the under volt plus the memory overclocking so i don't know guys i think for me personally unless i was just struggling to run a game and i absolutely needed every last fps i probably would not actually do this overclock i i'm a big fan of under volting and i liked the memory timings and i liked the memory speed increase so i think out of all the options that we're seeing here i'd choose option number two i would choose the under volt and just bump up the memory you got a tiny performance increase and the gpu is still staying really cool didn't seem like any downsides whatsoever here now if you're just chasing the maximum performance this is good and with that under volt we like i said this is cooler than the stock settings it's just not anywhere near as cool as we were you know at the uh just with the undervolt without the oc let's see the overall results here i think about a few extra fps and i hope that all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 62,458

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Id: x0dC-VC2lYs

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022