Undervolting a GPU.

[XX55XX]

Hello. In order to reduce power when mining for Bitcoins, I have decided to undervolt my graphics card in hopes of shaving off a few watts. I currently use an EVGA GTX 560 Ti Superclocked (clocked at 900 MHz) using a default voltage of 1.075V.

I want to keep my factory overclock while shaving off a few watts. So, I lowered the voltage to 1.025V using MSI Afterburner and ran the Crysis benchmark tool three times. Each run terminated successfully. Does that mean that my undervolt is stable? What other applications should I use to test whether or not this is a fluke?

 

[(sic)Klown12]

Try Furmark to test if it's stable. OCCT is also a good tool.

 

[deimos3428]

Bitcoin itself is probably a good tool, as it loads the GPU heavily while mining bitcoins.

 

[Spike]

To my understanding you can undervolt the card where it will be stable for bitcoin mining but will crash in games or using "normal" stability tests like furmark. I have not played with it yet but I'm tempted to undervolt my 5870...

 

[hdfxst]

why not downclock the memory,memory speed has no effect on bitcoin.clock it down to around 300.

 

[XX55XX]

why not downclock the memory,memory speed has no effect on bitcoin.clock it down to around 300.

Hmm. Thanks for the tip.

Unfortunately, to increase my yield in the face of increasing difficulty, I may need to swap for an HD 6870... at the cost of lowered performance in games.

 

[hdfxst]

keep watching newegg for a 110 dollar 5830,mine does 270Mhash/s

 

[tviceman]

Nvidia cards are poor at bitmining because they don't do brute force approach to computations as well as AMD's 58xx architecture does. Combine that with the fact that Nvidia has a lower performance/watt than AMD (even if it's just a little bit with the gtx560ti), I really doubt that using a gtx560ti to mine bitcoins will be worth your time.

 

[Nebor]

It seems like using an Nvidia card for bit-mining isn't really worth your time. And swapping out to an ATI card just for bit-mining at this point hardly seems worth it either.

 

[Muyoso]

Do not spend any money on new hardware. You WILL be sorry if you do. If you can get the hardware for free by selling what you have, then thats a different story. But seriously, in the next 12 hours the difficulty is going to go up 56% to over 1.35 million. This difficulty we are currently on only lasted 7 days. You will NOT earn your cost of new hardware back for months.

Also:
With your Nvidia card you are currently doing 2 things:

1)Wasting electricity
2)Reducing the lifespan of your GPU

 

[alanwest09872]

What the heck is bitmining?

 

[Madcatatlas]

Welcome to: 1 month ago, at the very least.

 

[tweakboy]

Use MSI Burner,, take down voltage and clock ,,

 

[Smartazz]

I just ran GUIMiner to test my undervolt on my 6870. It's stable at 1.062 volts in anything that isn't a game, so I just gotta remember to raise the voltage before gaming.

 

[Smartazz]

why not downclock the memory,memory speed has no effect on bitcoin.clock it down to around 300.

How do you force memory clock down so low? My 6870 refuses to go below 800MHz on the memory.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

How do you force memory clock down so low? My 6870 refuses to go below 800MHz on the memory.

Create a profile in CCC.

Open it up and make sure it's in the "Standard View". Then go to "Presets" and add one. After that, go to C\Users\*yourusername*\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles". There should be a file with the name of the preset you just created. Open it with notepad. Scroll down to a line that reads "<Feature name="MemoryClockTarget_0">" and change the values to something of your liking. Save and exit. Now right click on the CCC icon in your taskbar and invoke the preset.

You'll have to manually invoke it after every reboot and driver installation.

 

[hdfxst]

How do you force memory clock down so low? My 6870 refuses to go below 800MHz on the memory.

i use sapphire trixx but i think afterburner will work also

 

[bryanW1995]

Try Furmark to test if it's stable. OCCT is also a good tool.

fermi cards are throttled automatically in furmark (as are recent amd cards) so that's a no-go. OCCT is good, kombustor is good, but crysis demo has always been my last resort gpu test. The only thing I've ever had cause a failure on an OC that passed it's "crysis" was 3d mark vantage, so you might try a run or two of that or 3d mark 11 as well.

 

[lesterhung]

Do not spend any money on new hardware. You WILL be sorry if you do. If you can get the hardware for free by selling what you have, then thats a different story. But seriously, in the next 12 hours the difficulty is going to go up 56% to over 1.35 million. This difficulty we are currently on only lasted 7 days. You will NOT earn your cost of new hardware back for months.

Also:
With your Nvidia card you are currently doing 2 things:

1)Wasting electricity
2)Reducing the lifespan of your GPU

People have been saying that since months ago, and what happened?
All of them made their $ back.
Simply put, the difficulty and USD/BTC cannot be predicted, thus any argument is irrelevant.
Plus, not everyone is in to mine and convert it back to USD.

 

[gorobei]

Create a profile in CCC.

Open it up and make sure it's in the "Standard View". Then go to "Presets" and add one. After that, go to C\Users\*yourusername*\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles". There should be a file with the name of the preset you just created. Open it with notepad. Scroll down to a line that reads "<Feature name="MemoryClockTarget_0">" and change the values to something of your liking. Save and exit. Now right click on the CCC icon in your taskbar and invoke the preset.

You'll have to manually invoke it after every reboot and driver installation.

thank you, this was very helpful for me. good stuff.

 

[gorobei]

Do not spend any money on new hardware. You WILL be sorry if you do. If you can get the hardware for free by selling what you have, then thats a different story. But seriously, in the next 12 hours the difficulty is going to go up 56% to over 1.35 million. This difficulty we are currently on only lasted 7 days. You will NOT earn your cost of new hardware back for months.

Also:
With your Nvidia card you are currently doing 2 things:

1)Wasting electricity
2)Reducing the lifespan of your GPU

People have been saying that since months ago, and what happened?
All of them made their $ back.
Simply put, the difficulty and USD/BTC cannot be predicted, thus any argument is irrelevant.
Plus, not everyone is in to mine and convert it back to USD.

i think his point is that a gtx560 at 60 Mhash is generally worthless at the current and upcoming difficulties. 60hashes at 1.3million difficulty at 17$/coin gets you ~25$ per month. if you subtract the cost of electricity, your profit is measured in pennies.

 

[XX55XX]

Update:

I have undervolted my card to 1.05V. I have also given up on Bitcoin mining, since it's not making me any richer. Minus the cost of electricity, I have estimated I can bring in a few extra dollars per month, but I'm not going to stress my hardware 24/7 for just that.

 

[betasub]

^ I think this was the expected conclusion, from my reading of the bitcoin thread in this same forum.