- Joined
- Jan 10, 2022
- Messages
- 62 (0.07/day)
- Location
- Noord-Holland, Netherlands
| Processor | Intel i7 11700F |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asrock B560 Pro4 |
| Cooling | Noctua NH-D14 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x8GB |
| Video Card(s) | EVGA RTX 3060 Ti XC |
| Storage | Samsung 980 Pro 500 GB NVMe |
| Display(s) | BenQ XL2411P |
| Case | MSI MAG Forge 100R |
| Power Supply | XFX Pro Series 750W |
Yeah it makes sense lowering the allowed values to test it out in the first months the card is out. And few years back you could underclock the core a lot more than you can now too, so back then you could effectively run with lower voltages than you can these days. But since it's 2022 and there's way more mining benchmarks for this card than I need, I knew I didn't need to touch the core voltage min limits before I started the last bios mod (where I added your tRef recommendations). For some the XT and non-XT versions flashed with XT, people undervolt the memory too and maintain speed and stability but with a reference non-xt that's a bad idea so I didn't bother changing the minimums there either! The XT already comes with a BIOS that allows lower voltage on mem on max P state, I think 750mV. So people figured it can prob handle 800mV, rather than the default 850mV. This decreases memory temps but increases the memory voltage controllers' tempsNot 100%, no.
It was ~10 months ago since started looking at mining BIOSes and the one thing I remember compared to Polaris BIOS edits was that I couldn't reduce the minimum vcore less than a certain amount. I can't remember if it was 800mv or 750mv but there was an artificially-imposed floor in the BIOS that could be tweaked with MPT.
I don't have any cards left running stock BIOSes to check, but it looks like I picked 725mv as the new lowest limit just to give myself wiggle room during tweaking. I'm sure one or two of my cards are way better than average based on the bell curve of normal distribution but I don't have time to find the optimum clock/voltage and stability test iterations for 24 cards - that's a big project!
I just know from when I was running a 5700XT for gaming that 750mv is usually the lowest it was stable at game clocks (ie, not 300MHz 2D mode) and whilst 1500MHz+ likely needs ~1000mv, you should be able to get 1250-1350 without really raising voltage at all. I set 775mv typically because although some cards will run at 750 just fine, I kind of just need to keep things simple when dealing with 24 cards at once. I can only imagine the database of tweaks large mining farm operators have to keep up with - that's probably their full-time job!
Anyway, getting the best voltage/clocks is good but remember that you're never going to make massive differences to your overall power consumption - and the power numbers reported are just the power the GPU and VRAM are consuming so you still need to add ~10-20W to that for the VRM inefficiencies and the cooling fan depending on how fast it's running.
With the goal of seeking the optimum power efficiency to save that last couple of Watts, just remember that your CPU, RAM, case fans, SSD, all use like 50-100W and then the whole system is running off a power supply that is only 90% efficient so that's another 20W+ wasted.
Bascially, power use is proportional to the square of the voltage. Get the card clocked as high as you can whilst keeping the voltage as close to 750mv as you can get away with and remember that stability is more important than the last 1-2%
As for the consumption parts yeah absolutely. First of all I measure from the wall always, specially since the single-zombie-card-rig is running a 6700K just because I had it laying around and honestly the cheap original mining rig cpu (celeron) is so slow it actually drives me crazy when fine tunning, even with SSD or flash drive. So I compared that to the 6700K fully tunned down and it's unbelievably faster with only about 5% more power consumption and 0 heat difference with the original stock cooler and thermal paste (was covered don't worry
) and said "why the hell not?". All of this is much easier with a wall meter, since a better cpu might mean more power consumption in other places too it was the only way to be sure too. So yeah I know exactly what the system uses with and without the card, when I say "it went down by 3%" or something like that, that's from the wall Seems stable at 1280@775mV, 900 mem! Which brings me back to topic (sorry I love the mining chatter too but we might be going a bit off-topic here
)The card has been alive for over 30h! Incredible
Once again thanks to everyone that tried to help one way or another. I'll try not to be another single question disappearing dude and stick around, maybe I can help someone else with a less hardware/electronics related subject 
