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MSI Exclusive OverBoost Technology Unleash the Power

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Some laptops try to chase the tail of a desktop PC in performance, but with the MSI gaming laptops, they stand equal. Today we are glad to introduce the exclusive MSI OverBoost technology.

For those who purchased the new Raider GE and Vector GP series or are interested in it, MSI has released a video on YouTube to disclose the veil of MSI OverBoost technology.

OverBoost Technology Performance Reveal | MSI

Here’re some points you could peak how the exclusive MSI OverBoost technology works.

This is done by the outstanding thermal design and the effort of R&D teams, the Raider GE76 with MSI OverBoost technology can deliver up to 175 Watts + 45 Watts! That is an unprecedented 220 watts in total which is higher than the traditional power design of other laptop brands.

Here’s the way you can verify how much power your gaming laptop could provide. All you need to do is use the Prime 95 and Furmark to run stress testing on the CPU and GPU to push the workload to 100% at the same time. Please do remember your laptop needs to work with AC power, choose the Extreme Performance mode in the User Scenario, and change the GPU mode to the discrete GPU in MSI Center for maximum performance.

As you can see on the screenshot, the power of the Intel i9-12900HK processor is around 45 watts. And the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti Laptop graphics is running at up to 175 watts with Dynamic Boost 2.0 in supported applications, which is much higher than other laptops in the market and can only be achieved via MSI OverBoost technology. Other laptops without such design will drop CPU performance when GPU requires extra kick.

In addition to the spec upgrade, the new Raider GE76 with MSI OverBoost technology adds extra boosts to performance across benchmark software and triple-A titles. The CPU and GPU capabilities can be squeezed to the most extreme level under full loads ever without sacrificing frequency or stability.

If you don’t wanna miss any detail of the OverBoost technology, just click the YouTube link to watch the video. Or check out the official product page via the links below to learn more about the Raider GE and Vector GP series.

Raider GE series – Light’em Up
Vector GP series – Born for Performance

Unlock MSI Afterburner Power Limit Voltage Slider — 48 Watt Saving Per Card

Table of Contents

If your MSI Afterburner Power Limit Slider is stuck, greyed out or just makes no difference at all when you change it? Well, this should solve your problems. Most Gaming GPU heads want to Overclock there GPUs to get extra speed (FPS) from them regardless of Power Consumption or Heat.  But when GPU Mining, we want to help reduce heat, save power and keep our GPUs working reliable for a long time, i have some GPUs that have been running for 2+ years 24/7 with no reduction in performance

MSI Afterburner Power Limit does not change the Power Limit

What Software do i need to UnderClock or OverClock my GPU?

There are so many great software tools on the market but for me, all my build get these installed as soon as i complete a fresh install of Windows.

• MSI AfterBurner
• GPU-Z
• CPU-Z
• HWMonitor

How to Unlock MSI Afterburner Voltage Settings

To unlock the Voltage Settings that we are going to need, follow these steps in MSI Afterburner

• Click on the cog symbol / Settings
• Tick all the option highlighted in Green
• Reboot MSI Afterburner
• “Volt” reading should now be displayed

MSI Afterburner Unlock Voltage Settings

What is the MSI Afterburner Power Limit for?

The “Power Limit” keeps control of the amount of Power (Watts) a card can consume. Let’s say a GPU has a stock power consumption of 100w Thermal Design Power (TDP). We set the Power Limit to 80% and so the GPU is now limited to use only 80% (or 80watts) of its designed requirement. With this in mind we can use the Power Limit to help reduce the power draw of our GPU to help reduce costs. This is very different to the “Core Voltage” setting but these are linked.

The process of reducing the “Core Voltage” of a GPU is called GPU UnderVolting and can be performed on most components in a quality PC, not just the GPU. Read up on  How to Reduce Power on a Mining Rig

We see here with stock settings, MSI Afterburner Power Limit set to 100% our Gigabyte RTX 2060 draws 129 watts and has a hash rate of 28 MH/s at 217kH/W. This setup needs some tuning. The highlighted areas in green show what settings we need to focus on and the relationship between GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner has, this will help with the tuning

MSI Afterburner Power limit at Stock Settings – 129watt for 28MH/s

When we move the slide bar on the Power Limit, we should normally expect to see a drop in Power Consumption of the GPU. If your Power Limit Settings directly affect the Board Power Draw the read increase electricity efficiency while GPU Mining On some Nvidia RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 (maybe some other cards, drop a comment below if you know of any) the Power Limit bar does NOT change the Board Power Draw very much at all, as seen here.

MSI Afterburner Power limit Not Changing Board Power Draw

What is the Mining Performance and Hashrate of the RTX 2060?

The RTX 2060 at stock settings mines ETH at 28MH/s. Most of these cards come with Samsung DDR6 Memory, with a stock speed of 1750MHz. They also come with a huge heat sink and 2 fans, if this sounds like your card then the memory can be overclocked to easily achieve 31 MH/s.

Gigabyte RTX2060 Samsung Memory

NOTE: Overclock at your Own Risk.  Pushing clock speeds to far can damage your GPU

Slowly increase the “Memory Clock” Speed +100 at a time. Monitor the Hash Rate and Board Power Draw. Any graphics glitches (graphic artifacts on screen) or crashes, STOP immediately and reduce the overclock by +100. Reboot your system and test again at the reduced speed. If all is stable for 24h then this is your safe overclock speed.

Ultimately you are trying to increase the overclock, but not create graphic artifacts or crashes, while not increasing the Board Power Draw, temperatures or fan speeds. This can take some trial and error and a lot of practice and patience. Here I stopped at 200Mhz Overclock as the Power Draw started to increase.

Gigabyte RTX2060 Samsung Memory Overclock – 32.2 MH/s

• Gigabyte RTX2060 Samsung Memory – Stock – 28 MH/s
• Gigabyte RTX2060 Samsung Memory – Overclock – 32.2 MH/s

How to Reduce Power Usage if You can’t Adjust Power Limit in MSI Afterburner

On the Gigabyte Geforce RTX 2060 REV 2.0 GPU the Power Limit Slider bar does nothing to reduce the power delivered to the card and so we have to look at another way to reduce the power. This is now when we use the “Curve Editor” in MSI AfterBurner

Here we will focus on the following

• Board Power Draw – How much Watts the GPU is using, we need to reduce this. Currently around 125watt
• Hashing Speed of the GPU – 32.54 MH/s current mining speed
• Core Clock – Set to 0
• Curve Editor – This will adjust the core voltage that will affect the Board Power Draw
• GPU Voltage – 0.9680v or 968mV – This should also reduce

MSI Afterburner Core Voltage – 0.9680v or 968mV

How do I use MSI Afterburner’s Curve Editor to Undervolt GPU?

Step 1 – Click “Curve Editor” or press CTRL + F – a Graph screen should open

MSI Afterburner Undervolt GPU – Curve Editor

 

This graph is showing the X-axis as the Voltage and the Y-axis is the Core Clock frequency. What we need to do is reduce the number of Volts the cards get at a given Clock Frequency, thus reducing our Board Power Draw. At the same time not reducing our Hash rate of 32MH/s by as little as possible

Step 2 – Hold down SHIFT and “click and hold” the far most left part of the graph. While holding the mouse button down, drag right to the end to highlight all of the graph

Undervolt GPU – Curve Editor

This step can be a little tricky and always takes me a few attempts but when completed correctly the graph should turn a slightly lighter shade of grey to show its been highlighted.

Step 3 – Click on one of the small light grey squares on the Volt/Frequency curve and a new box should appear that you can type a value into, now press SHIFT+ENTER

Undervolt GPU – Curve Editor

If completed correctly, you will be able to edit the GPU Frequency in the small box. This will manually fix the GPU Core to run at a set speed no matter the load on the card.

 

Step 4 – Try starting with 900MHz and work up in 50s until you find the lowest setting the card will run at.

Undervolting GPU using Curve Editor

I have set the frequency to 900MHz, the curved graph is now flat meaning it will try and run at this speed no matter the load on the card. Close the Graph and click on the “Apply” Tick button to try the settings on the GPU.

Undervolt GPU – Applying the Settings – No Change

If, when applying the setting nothing changes then either an error was made or the card doesn’t support that low a voltage. Back to step 1 but increase by 50MHz

Step 5 – Try the steps again but increase the value by 50 each time until a setting holds. This card held its setting that i typed, 1050MHz but auto adjusted up to 1320Mhz. This will be the min setting the card will run at

Undervolt GPU – Lowest Setting Possible 1320MHz

Step 6 – Sit back and review your settings, let the GPU run for a while to confirm it doesn’t crash on the Undervolt.

Gigabyte RTX2060 Lowest Voltage – 32.55 MH/s for 77watts

After we have confirmed the GPU doesn’t crash or the hashing rate doesn’t reduce (if it does, increase MHz by another 50 and repeat the process until the card is stable) we can see that:

• GPU Clock – Has reduced due to limit we placed on it via the “Curve Editor”
• Board Power Draw – Has dropped to 77.4 watts
• GPU Voltage – Reduced to 706mV
• Core Clock – Has changed to “Curve” to show you are using the curve editor settings

Step 7 – Save your setting and “Apply at Start-up” ready for your next reboot. Click the Windows Icon to apply on boot, then the disk icon and then a slot number to save the setup too.

MSI Afterburner Saving Settings

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GeForce RTX 3060 undervolting — minus 50 watts and 10 degrees in 5 minutes

This content was written by a website visitor and has been rewarded.

In recent years, I have increasingly noticed that PC users have a growing interest in undervolting video cards and processors, and even on our website, overclockers.ru, dedicated to overclocking, there are more and more blogs on this topic. I also wrote on this topic, having made a successful processor undervolt two years ago, which you can learn about in the Guide blog: how to reduce AMD Ryzen power consumption by 20%. The number of reviews of video card owners at our conference is also growing, who have made a successful undervolting and share the results: a drop in temperature, noise and power consumption.

There is nothing surprising in the growth of interest in undervolting, and processor and video card manufacturers are primarily to blame for this. Turbo boost or dynamic frequency technologies squeeze almost all the juice out of our hardware, giving near maximum performance, but often at the expense of heat and power consumption. This is especially noticeable on Nvidia video cards of the sixth line: the GeForce GTX 960 had a TDP of 120 watts, which was also retained by the GeForce GTX 1060. The GeForce RTX 2060 increased its power consumption to 160 watts, and the GeForce RTX 3060 already up to 170 watts!

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GeForce RTX 3060, due to the incompletely unlocked video chip, shows one of the worst performance per watt results even among the rest of the NVIDIA Ampere family, lagging behind the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti by about 18%, and behind the GeForce RTX 3070 — by 20%. And the Radeon RX 6800 is completely behind in terms of energy efficiency by 31%.

At this rate, we can get to the GeForce RTX 4060 with a power consumption of 180-190 watts, and this despite the ever-decreasing process technology, which reduces power consumption. Well, as for overclocking, getting an increase of 5-10% performance, which cannot be seen by eye, at the cost of increasing noise and power consumption is not a very attractive goal, and given the cost of video cards in 2022, it is even frightening.

While mining on the GeForce GTX 1060, I quickly mastered the undervolt and bought Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual , I already knew in advance that this model would work for me at reduced voltage. After all, despite the huge price, this is a budget-level model, and its cooling system is sharpened to keep temperatures below 70 degrees, at the cost of increasing noise. For a video card with a power consumption of 170 watts, Palit used a heatsink pierced by three thick heat pipes and additionally removing heat from the memory modules and the power system.

The radiator is cooled by two fans with a diameter of 85 mm, which are already clearly audible in a closed case, starting from 1500 rpm, and in games, keeping the temperature up to 67-68 degrees, the fans spin up to 1700-1800 rpm , which is already perceived as annoying noise.

It is worth noting that the identical cooling system is used in the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Dual OC video cards with a TDP of 200 watts. As for the printed circuit board, its compactness becomes its minus, all heating elements are located quite close to each other, which also imposes special requirements for cooling.

The same board is used in the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 StormX models, which have become the most affordable and compact GeForce RTX 3060 models. For these reasons, my main goal is to reduce heat to reduce noise and in order to extend the life of a video card that cost me the price of which you could recently buy an entire gaming computer.

Preparing

For undervolting, we need MSI Afterburner and HWiNFO utilities, a game that loads the graphics card decently and a stress test. I will use the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark and the Superposition Benchmark, which loads the graphics card noticeably more than games.
First you need to understand how the video card behaves in the default conditions, because we all have different cases and room temperatures, and in the reviews of video cards, as a rule, they use an open stand in an air-conditioned room. I will measure power consumption not only with the help of the HWiNFO utility, but also with a wattmeter purchased on Aliexpress.

Running Superposition Benchmark at 1080p Extreme settings, I got this picture. The video card warmed up to 67-68 degrees, with a frequency floating around 1800 MHz and fan speeds reaching almost 1800 per minute. The entire PC consumed about 261 watts on a wattmeter, and the video card ran into a limit of 170 watts and dropped voltage during the test.

Benchmark results will help us understand how much performance we lose by using a strong voltage reduction. In the Superposition Benchmark, I got 5106 points.

In the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark, the clocks were higher, up to 1927 MHz, and the power consumption was lower, as were the fan speeds. The wattmeter showed PC consumption up to 291 watts, because the processor was also involved in the game.

We managed to score 16315 points in the benchmark.

Undervolting

Now you can start undervolting, for which we open the main window of the MSI Afterburner utility and press the key combination Ctrl + F, opening the frequency and voltage editor.

In it, we need to choose the optimal ratio of frequency and voltage, such that the performance does not drop too much, but at the same time that the voltage is as low as possible. For video cards like mine, with not the best cooling, in order to get an acceptable result, you should try voltages below 900 mV. For example, it will be 825 mV. For the initial search for a stable combination of frequency and voltage, it is convenient to use the «L» key, which can block the frequency and voltage of the video card at one point.

To do this, raise the entire curve by holding Shift, or one of its points by 200-300 MHz up and block it by pressing «L», after which we carefully test the video card in stress tests and games for artifacts, driver crashes or black screens . The process is absolutely identical to overclocking, only the video card is limited to a certain voltage. In my case, a stable frequency of 1800 MHz at a voltage of 825 mV turned out to be stable, and I decided to stop at this value, even if I lost a little in frequency. But even a frequency of 1800 MHz is more than enough for all my games.

After running the video card in this mode in games and tests and making sure of the stability of the work, it is worth starting to create a constant undervolt profile for the entire voltage frequency curve. To do this, reset the settings with the reset button in MSI Afterburner, raise the entire curve with the Shift key and the mouse so that the 1800 MHz point is opposite 825 mV.

Now we need to align the points to the right of ours into one line, for which we hold down Shift and drag the mouse over the black background, selecting all the points.

Now select with the mouse any of the points to the right of the working one, press Shift + Enter and enter in the frequency field a frequency slightly lower than our working one, for example, 1777 MHz and press Enter. The dots line up.

By clicking «Apply» in MSI Afterburner, the points are aligned and we get the finished frequency and voltage curve with undervolt, which must be saved to the profile.

Results

Now you can proceed to additional tests, but keep in mind that the temperatures will drop very significantly, and the automatic graphics card is designed to start the fans when warmed up above 60 degrees. And there is a risk that in some games the fans will not even start, and this is not at all suitable for video memory chips that continue to heat up despite the cold chip. Therefore, it is worth setting up a software fan control mode in MSI Afterburner with a start from lower temperatures, I set the start closer to 50 degrees.

Now we can see what we got by running the tests again. In Superposition Benchmark we lose about 5% performance.

But the power consumption of the video card drops to 121 watts, and the temperature drops to 58 degrees with comfortable fan speeds of 1461 per minute. The wattmeter showed a drop in PC power consumption to 206 watts, which gives a difference of more than 50 watts. 121 watts in a heavy test — this consumption is even lower than that of a novelty in the lower class, GeForce RTX 3050 .

In the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark, we lose about 5% due to a slight decrease in frequency.

But the power consumption is even more drastically reduced, falling to almost 100 watts on monitoring. And the entire PC on the wattmeter reduced consumption from 291 to 215 watts! The temperature dropped to 55 degrees at a comfortable speed.

This is already the power consumption level of budget video cards, for example, Radeon RX 6500 XT with its 107 watts. It is worth noting that when turning on vertical sync in games where FPS exceeds 60, temperatures and power consumption drop even more and I ran Horizon Zero Dawn with average numbers of 80-90 watts and temperatures barely reaching 50 degrees.

It would be more correct to measure the gain in temperature with constant fan speeds and in the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark with 1700 rpm, as they were before the undervolt, we get only 50 degrees, due to which the difference with the factory settings is 17 degrees!

Results

As you can see, even a video card with not the best cooling can be easily turned into a quiet, cold and economical one with the help of an undervolt. The GeForce RTX 3060 performed much better than the GeForce GTX 1060 in terms of undervolting potential, reducing power consumption in games by about 65 watts or 60%. Yes, in my example, we lost about 5% of performance, but you can reduce the voltage not so drastically, leaving, for example, a combination of 875 mV and 1900 MHz.

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Write in the comments, what were the best results in the undervolt for you?

This material was written by a site visitor and has been rewarded.

6 simple software ways to reduce the heat of the PC and laptop video card in games

This material was written by a site visitor and has been rewarded.

With almost every new generation, processors and video cards switch to a new, thinner process technology that promises lower temperatures and low power consumption, but everything turns out exactly the opposite. For several years now, power consumption and, accordingly, the heating of video cards have been growing. This is clearly seen in the most popular, sixth series of Nvidia graphics cards: the GeForce GTX 960, released in 2015, consumed 120 watts, the GeForce GTX 1060 in 2016 — 120 watts, the GeForce RTX 2060 in 2019 — 160 watts, and the GeForce RTX 3060 in 2021 — 170 watts. Looking at the high power consumption of the new GeForce RTX 4000, no one doubts that the GeForce RTX 4060 will be much more voracious and hotter than the GeForce RTX 3060. adding a couple of fans, the laptop is limited by the standard cooling system and temperatures under 90 degrees in games, along with performance sagging due to throttling, have become familiar to modern users.

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High temperatures significantly reduce the life of electronics, increasing the risk of chip degradation and even leading to the so-called «dump» when, due to frequent heating and cooling, the solder under the chip cracks and contact is lost. With the release of GeForce RTX and Radeon RX 5000 graphics cards and the introduction of GDDR6 and GDDR6X hot video memory, users have another problem. Even if your video card is doing well with the cooling of the video chip, this does not mean that everything is fine with the cooling of the video memory and many even expensive models of video cards suffer from overheating.

There are often no temperature sensors on the video memory, and the degree of its heating can only be judged indirectly. But, usually, if we manage to lower the temperature of the video chip, then the temperature of the video memory also drops, because in modern video cards they are most often cooled by one radiator.

In this blog, we’ll look at six ways to cool down your graphics card, whether it’s a laptop or discrete. Let’s start with the simplest, for novice users, and finish with the most effective.

Turning V-sync on

If you have a 60 or 75 hertz monitor, simply forcing V-sync on will often help bring the temperature down. You can enable it in the game settings, but better — in the driver settings. For Nvidia graphics cards, this parameter is called vertical sync.

Limiting FPS

But if you have a monitor with a high refresh rate or you don’t like how v-sync affects responsiveness in the game, then you can limit the number of frames per second that games will give out. This is done using the MSI Afterburner utility. FPS can also be locked below 60, for example — 50, which will give an even stronger decrease in temperature and will help if your game freezes due to a weak processor.

Lowering the graphics settings in the game

Have you turned on vsync or limited FPS, but the temperature has not changed? This happens if the video card, for example, gives out 55-75 FPS, and you limited the FPS to 60. In this case, the video card will be loaded by almost 100% even with the FPS limit and will continue to warm up. To reduce the heat in this case, you need to reduce the graphics settings in the game, for example, drop them from high to medium. In modern games, such a decrease in picture quality is often even imperceptible to the eye, but the video card will noticeably unload.

Limiting Power Limit and Temp Limit

In MSI Afterburner, you can limit the Power Limit or «Power Limit», which sets the maximum power consumption of the video card, and by lowering it by 20-30%, you can achieve a strong drop in temperature.

The adjustment range of the Power Limit parameter will vary for different models of video cards, and if its reduction is possible in a small range, then it is worth trying to reduce the parameter
Temp Limit, which sets the maximum chip temperature. You just need to remember to untie the parameters from each other by clicking on the small chain icon between them.

Increasing fan speed

It happens that the video card cooling system is configured to work with minimal noise at the expense of temperature. Video memory especially suffers with this method of setting if it is cooled by a separate radiator. Therefore, you should not rejoice when you see that the fans of the video card are spinning at 700-9 rpm.00 per minute in the game, because it is quite possible that at this time the video memory is simply baked like in an oven. An example of such video cards is the MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G, with the most powerful cooling of the chip, and very weak — video cards and power systems.

You can increase the fan speed using MSI Afterburner by setting the increased speed manually, by ear, finding a compromise between noise and temperature.

Or by setting the fan speed versus temperature curve, which is more complicated but much more effective.

And laptops have the ability to increase the speed of the main fan through proprietary software, which will cool both the video card and the processor if the cooling system still has potential and it does not work at its limit.

Undervolting

In almost all the examples above, we sacrificed something, lost FPS or increased fan noise, but there is a way to tune the cooling system so that it will run quieter, temperatures will drop, and performance will remain at normal levels . This method is undervolting, the most difficult of all, but also the most effective. To do this, using the voltage frequency curve in MSI Afterburner, which can be accessed by pressing Ctrl + F, set the range of maximum voltages that the video card will reach, in the region of 800-950 mV.

I wrote a separate, detailed article about undervolting « Undervolting GeForce RTX 3060 — minus 50 watts and 10 degrees in 5 minutes » and having once configured the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual with not the best cooling, I play silence and temperatures below 60 degrees.

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But the best way to avoid high temperatures and fan noise is to immediately choose a video card with good cooling, especially since they are getting cheaper every day and the price difference between a regular and a cool model is getting smaller. From the assortment of popular video cards in Citylink, ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 3060, MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING and Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock can boast of such cooling.