Ok, i’m kind of new to this. i do not want to start with flashing my bios yet, just fiddling around with settings and checking out what the possibilities are. of course one day sooner or later i will want to flash my bios, but first i need to get a good feeling about what i’m doing.
I own a MSI RX 470 8GB Gaming X, and i have tried to optimize it’s settings already.
since i’m very new to this, i could use the input of you guys!
the defaults from this card are as follows: gpu clock 1242, mem clock 1650.
with these stock settings i am getting around 147-148 H/s and in GPU-Z the avg power draw is around 78.8W.
Goal i want to achieve, low Watt per H/s ratio, the electricity is very expensive over here (€0.20 per Kwh).
The tools that i have used:
- msi afterburner
- amd wattman
-TechPowerUp GPU-Z
so far i understand the following:
TechPowerUp GPU-Z
with this tool you are supposed to be able to check which type of memory you have because of flashing it later on. i have no idea where i could find this information in the tool though.
for now i am using this tool to check my ASIC Quality (for this card that i currently have it’s 68.6%).
furthermore i use this tool in the sensors tab, i select ‘Show Average Reading’ from the select list under ‘GPU only Power Draw’, to get a quick (but not complete usage of the card) overview of what i’m more or less using, and what is the impact of changing settings.
msi afterburner
with this tool i can set the core voltage (mV). i have read somewhere that if you want to undervolt it’s good practise to start with -72 and continue to around -95.
nice part is that msi afterburner changes it by itself to multipliers of 6 , so i guess the tools knows what it’s doing 
furthermore i have used it to change the gpu clock from 1242 to 1150, and the mem clock from 1650 to 2000.
all good, this dramatically lowers my avg power draw.
i have lots of questions however, why 1150, and not 1140 gpu clock, where to stop. same for mem clock.
how to best approach my goal of getting the best low watt / H/s ratio.
as far as i understood for the core voltage is that it’s just a matter of trying, more low the better, and continue until it breaks, stick a little above that, right?
for now i used: core voltage (mV) -78, core clock 1150, and memory clock 2000.
The result, gpu-z avg power draw gives me 58.2w now on claymore 7, which sounds pretty good to me! h/s is 141 - 142
amd wattman
Instead of using the msi afterburner approach i did also test amd wattman.
With this tool i am getting quickly lost. i found some settings from somebody else which i have tried, and it works. But i don’t have a comfortable feeling with it because i don’t know what i’m doing yet
GPU, stock default is 1242Mhz, mem stock default is 1650MHz.
I have made the following changes:
- change GPU frequency % to -7.5%. i click apply. this gives me 1150MHz.
- underneath the voltage, if i change it to manual i see 1025 for status 6 and 1100 for status 7. i have changed these to 880 and 890.
- memory, status 1 changed to 2000 from 1650, and voltage from 1000 changed into 920.
The result, gpu-z avg power draw gives me 64.2w now on claymore 7, h/s is 138 - 140
please note, the testing numbers that i gave above are based on short time periods (5 minutes). maybe over longer time they would end up being around the same, i don’t know yet.
questions:
- are these 2 tools basically doing the same job?
- in msi afterburner it says ‘core voltage’, and in amd wattman you have the gpu and the memory voltage separate. what would core voltage be? are there really 3 voltages that you could set, or is the core voltage from msi afterburner just the label on top of the gpu and memory voltage underneath?
- any advice on the best settings?