Underclocking video card to save on heat, noise, etc.

[fd9]

I was curious if any of you have tried underclocking your video card when you're not gaming. I only have one computer at home, so I use it as a office workstation most of the time. I saw the the nTune utility from nVidia has an option to save different profiles, which allows you to easily switch between different settings... I was wondering if any of you had tried this before, and if so, was it worth it?

 

[clickynext]

I did it with my 8600GT when I had it. With that card the fan seemed noisy even at low speed, so I have no idea if it's worth it or not, but it works...

 

[Oyeve]

My old X1950XTX had GDDR4 mem and that baby throttled down automatically. I miss that card.

 

[zagood]

You can save overclocking/underclocking profiles in RivaTuner. With RivaTuner in XP you can also set different 2d/3d clockspeeds.

-z

 

[Tiamat]

Any ideas if RivaTuner et.al. work in Vista 64bit?

 

[zagood]

It works for the basics...profiles, clocks, temp monitoring, fan speeds. You can set launchers to work in the monitoring window, but can't set separate 2d/3d clocks.

-z

 

[Nedder]

ATI 3870/3850 do this already. When idle the core clock drops from 775 to 300. Running memory lower doesn't save much I guess.

 

[0roo0roo]

hm, can one go too far though, is it safe.

 

[IcePickFreak]

I did the same with my 8800GTS 640mb for the same reasons. I had 3 profiles that I mainly used, an underclocked configuration that loaded at startup and I use working in office apps & general stuff. Then I had my max stable oc config that I loaded when I wanted to play a game. I also had the default/stock settings, that I used when doing some 3d work. It worked great, and I plan on doing the same with my 512mb GTS - I just got it back from my stepup eariler this week and now I got a new cpu & mobo coming so the underclock is on hold til the new setup (Of course I already OC'd it). I did the same with my x1950xt that I had previous to the 640mb as well, and even was able to undervolt that one with ATItool.

I used RivaTuner for this, and I just setup hotkeys to switch the clocks, worked great. I set it up so ctrl+pgup is the OC'd config, ctrl+pgdown is the underclocked config, and ctrl+home as the factory/stock clocks. Made it so easy to switch between clocks, and never had problems switchin em even if I forgot to do it before starting the game. I also use hotkeys to turn on & off Rivatuners OSD, and have it show core/shader/mem clocks, gpu temp, fan duty%, vram usage, and finally FPS. That way I can verify my settings while in game, & monitor temps, fan, FPS in every & any game. Heck, the OSD will even work in window mode when I work with 3d stuff and will show FPS. It works out great and have had absolutly 0 problems using this kind of setup over the past 4 months or so I've been back in the nvidia camp. When I first switched back to the 8800 from the x1950 I was missing stuff like this that was pretty easy to setup with ATItool. Once I read up a little on Rivatuner though, I like it even more.

As far as going too far underclocking, I don't think there would be much danger there. I actually dropped mine down quite a bit without probs. The x1950 I undervolted a bit too much when initially setting it up and it just gave artifacts at the desktop lol, just bumped the voltage back up and I never experienced any problems with it for the next year that I had it. Going too low shouldn't do any harm other than not be stable at those settings ie. you can't fry the card underclocking and/or undervolting. I suppose if you went to extremes maybe it could do something, I dunno. I ran 25% lower than factory clocks with no problems and over time never degraded performance or stability with my max stable OC on either ATI or Nvidia cards.

EDIT: I just noticed this after posting and have to say, damn OrooOroo I've never seen anybody in any forum with that many posts! :shocked: :beer:

 

[coolpurplefan]

I know this is an alternative solution. But, you can check out the tomshardware article on the Thermalright HR-03 and Thermalright V2.
http://www.tomshardware.com/20...graphics_card_coolers/

The reason why I'm mentionning this is because the these are designed to run passively but the temperatures with a fan are awesome. I chose the Thermalight V2 because I didn't want interference with the northbridge heatsink (Zalman NB47J) and it's inside a Silverstone LC20 desktop case. I put a Coolermaster 80mm fan on it but later I'd like a Nexus Real Silent Case Fan on it. You can always choose to put the fan on a fan controller as well.

 

[taltamir]

onlu 25% underclock and you say you cant go too far? someone is gonna take you on it and underclock 95% at default voltage... I wonder how that would work out...