Folding Forum

I have a system I run in my living room. At full bore the fan is too loud. If I can keep the fan down to 75% its okay. I am using Aorus Engine. Would it be better to underclock and undervolt until the system stays under 80c at 75% fan manually or better to let the card auto throttle when it hits 80c (therm or pwr) and keep fan at 75%? Case is open and I'm running FAh fulltime.

Thank you

My rtx 2070 was undervolted from 1.080 V to 0.95 V. The temperatures went from 76-73C to 60-63C. The core speed was 1815mhz for both. The fans went from 70% to 52-58%. All these numbers depend a lot on the card and manufacturer. The wattage went from 175w to 115-145w depending on the type of wu. I do it with msi afterburning. No need to decrease core speed at all.

Be careful on lowing the voltage. Sometimes it looks like it is stable, but in reality you are losing ppd. Be cautious and conservative. Do not touch the memory, it automatically undervolts cause fah does not depend much on it.

Don't worry about the 80C temp on a GPU but if the nose is a problem, you either need to find alternative cooling like additional fans, an NZXT G12 + AIO or full water-cooling or you need to reduce the amount of heat being produced.

I don't know Aorus Engine but assuming it's similar to Afterburner you can reduce the Power setting which will automatically lower clocks. Undervolting will not automatically reduce the clocks and so ay simply introduce instability.

HaloJones wrote:I don't know Aorus Engine but assuming it's similar to Afterburner you can reduce the Power setting which will automatically lower clocks. Undervolting will not automatically reduce the clocks and so ay simply introduce instability.

This. Just drop the power limit and let the card do what's necessary to meet it and stay stable.

You might even find that performance doesn't suffer too much - a disproportionate number of watts are needed for the last few MHz of boost and the corresponding drop in temperature increases the electronic efficiency further.

Use undervolting if possibe, it maintains performance when clocks are not touched. Works very well with me to reduce fan noise and power consumption. Auto throtteling reduces clock=performance to reach the designated level.

The point about undervolting I think is that it's a little more trial and error. Simply reducing the max power from 100 to 90% makes the card's BIOS do the work of performance management

Nvidia GPUs work best with power capping. AMD work best with undervolting.
Power capping allows for Nvidia GPUs to save about 30% of power, for nearly identical performance.
Especially when you can also tune the clocks to work more efficiently.

The lower power draw, directly relates to lower temperatures.
While a GPU can run at 80C perfectly fine for a short time, it's recommended to keep them as low as possible in temperature.
Below 75C is perfectly normal. Below 70C if you can. Below 65C is very good. Below 60C is awesome. Below 55C is hard to do, and once you drop below 40-45C (watercooling) under full load, the GPU will hit it's highest frequencies nearly always (like the P0 state).

Aside from power capping on my Nvidia GPUs, I try to set the fan as high as possible.
Most of my GPUs are Gigabyte 3 fan designs with quiet fans. Even at 100% they are hardly audible.
The fans that are audible (like Asus Blower GPUs) I keep at the threshold right below annoying.
On those Asus GPUs, it's 84%, and it's setting may be different from situation to situation. Some people think 84% fan on those is still very loud; but the server is behind a glass sliding door, and only a very faint noise is heard through the door. So for me it works fine.

So I currently have it set to:

75% fan - highest that isn't a jet engine
90% Power Target
75 C Target Temp

I"m almost always temp throttled and sometimes also PWR throttled.

GeForce® GTX 1660 Ti OC 6G

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Graphics-Ca ... TOC-6GD#kf

Takes my PPD from around 1000000 to 800000. My clock averages 1740-1780 (normally 1800). My voltage runs around .95 to .98.

JDE100 wrote:So I currently have it set to:

75% fan - highest that isn't a jet engine
90% Power Target
75 C Target Temp

I"m almost always temp throttled and sometimes also PWR throttled.

GeForce® GTX 1660 Ti OC 6G

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Graphics-Ca ... TOC-6GD#kf

Takes my PPD from around 1000000 to 800000. My clock averages 1740-1780 (normally 1800). My voltage runs around .95 to .98.

Dual fan designs like that, usually prefer running at 100% fan speed, and below 130W. To maintain ppd, overclocking ram and gpu is recommended.

Ram should be set to 7.5//15Gbps.
Capping power will reduce boost clocks. Those clocks can be gained again by overclocking. I would go as far as power capping down to 30%.

Instead of playing with close to HW values, I rather lower the power cap of the cards by using "nvidia-smi".

Check instance number of your card using "nvidia-smi" with root, sudo, Administrator rights. My "GTX 1660 TI" has e.g. a (max) power limit by factory of "(-pl) 130W" and might be the only card in the system, so instance# "0".
I usually cap by 25W, sometimes by 30W, on very hot days. Change can be made persistent, what I don't do, I adjust on every reboot. This can be done everytime on runtime, you face results within short time ... bidirectional.

Capping power limit by 25W doesn't really harm your PPD, something between 0-4%, as it is kind of eliminating the inefficient high load operation range of the GPU.

So, without losing PPD capabilites, you lower GPU temps significant and therefore the fan's noise. Since the fan curves are not linear, it's enough to have the GPU temps lowered some degrees C° ...

-PM is not persistent across reboots.
It should be persistent for as long as the desktop is running.
However, if you close the desktop (log out, or sudo init 3), the drivers reset even with PM enabled.

I've looked around for a while for permanent settings, but haven't yet found how to do it in Linux, unless you can write a startup script that will run at boot.
But even then, you won't be able to adjust the OC/Fan speed, just the 'pl' values.