For me, efficiency and cost go hand in hand.
You want to maximize PPD? Instead of trying to overclock GPUs, you'd be able to get more points by just lowering the wattage on all GPUs, and stick another GPU in the PC.
While this makes little sense for GTX GPUs, or systems with only 1 GPU;
once you start with multi RTX, Titans RTX, or Quadro RTX GPU systems, you'll hit the limits of the breaker quite quickly.
That's when capping power becomes a real issue; not only for heat concerns, but also electric cost.
I spend on average the price of one RTX 2060 on electricity per month running 4 servers; constantly playing with hardware for best PPD (or highest performance) per Watt.
agent71 wrote:I think you misread my post or my post was unintentially confusing. I don't run the P106-90 mining GPU at 125W. It can't run at that wattage. Max it can run at is 75W and minimum 60W. Dropping to 60W makes little or no difference in the GPU temp but causes huge drops in PPD. Max power it'll do 250K PPD but dropping to 60W brings PPD to 150-175K PPD. A >30% drop in PPD.
The RTX however does benefit from capping the wattage. Drop all the way to 125W and RTX2060 still runs about 1.1M PPD compared with 1.5M at full power.
That GPU is closer to a 1050 than a 1060. If they're Chinese branded GPUs, they might have ripped you off, by forcing a 106p bios on a 1050 GPU.
Happened all the time 2-4 years ago.
On my GTX 1050 3GB, I had similar power and PPD values (I hit 300k PPD though), and lowering power to the minimum indeed came with a high PPD penalty.
Those GPUs didn't benefit a lot from capping the power. Instead I used to overclock the crap out of them!
1- They don't really get very hot (in my case, the hottest they became, was like 60C with a 100% fan curve).
2- Those GPUs lower only very little power compared to the overhead of the rest of the PC. If you could lower your electric bill by 15 W on a 200-300W system, it wouldn't make sense losing nearly 100k PPD.
For a 1060, capping the power from 120W to ~85W made a difference. Below 85W (down to 75W) it also suffered too high PPD losses.
I don't have a 1050 anymore, but would advise you to play around with the power curve a bit, and lowering it by 5 or 10% at most from stock.
But on those GPUs, you'll get far better performance, if you can keep the GPUs running in the 50C region (not unattainable on an open cooler, dual fan design)