It's worth noting that NVIDIA and AMD report power usage differently through software, so it's not really 100% comparable. It's better to have a physical measurement of power draw using something like the NVIDIA PCAT instead.
Exactly! Many people don't realize amd is pulling more then the let on! I find it funny the real knowledgeable have all explained how it works. Yet people still want to act like ita 200watts to 250watts eveb at the high end.
i have got a gtx 1070 undervolted and underclocked pulling around 85w down from the stock 140w if i leave the card at stock, plus my old haswell i7 pulls around 50w during gaming. From the wall i measured 175w total power draw while running dying light 2 which i find to be pretty damn efficient for the performance of the system as it runs great at 1080p and i only lose about 7fps typically.
@@JudeTheRUclipsPoopersubscribe yea Pascal was nuts when it came to power efficiency, even the 1080 (the launch flagship) still only needed a single 8-pin, which I still find impressive
@@exaltedb it's also amazing how much you can tweak pascal cards. I mean I managed to get -200mv and dropped the core down 100mhz to 1760mhz and it's stable and running great and barely lost any performance. You definitely can't do the same thing with an ampere card without it crashing and being unstable.
From my experience, using RX 6600 XT and RX 6800. You have to set the minimum frequency to 100mhz lower than max value. The frequency keeps fluctuating if the min is kept at stock value (i think it was 500mhz). Do not worry, on idle, it will not stay at the min frequency, it will downclock to very low value.
No. Best performance is somewhere in between. Idk why, but amd overclocking is just wierd. (Source: did a lot of tinkering with 69xt, from 180 watts, to 500+)
@@DawidDoesTechStuff on my 6900xt efficiency improved when not hitting power limits. Lowering max clock helps too. I ran it at 180w with significantly more than stock performance. RDNA 2 OC is like voodoo magic 🤦♂️. Let's hope rdna 3 is a bit less wierd.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff in case more power tool doesn't work with your AIB model, you can just save the mpt profile as a dot reg file and then run it as admin. In case you are unfamiliar with morepowertool, reply to this message i will explain in more detail. I have a 6600 as well. Was able to overclock it way past an rtx 3060 using mpt.
Funnily enough they talked about this on DF direct the other week and they concluded that software optimisation is the fly in the ointment with trying to quantify this sort of thing!
I think you weren't getting any higher clocks when moving the slider because you were hitting power limit, if you moved the power limit slider to the right, it would let the card reach the clocks you want it to, but then again that's against the point of the video because you're increasing wattage for minimal gains probably.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff There is 1 more thing you can do to squeeze the absolute limit of the card. Take out those RGB lighting on the GPU . It shares the same power budget with the entire card. Since your Nvidia A2000 doesn't have any lighting, the RX6600 should be the same too.
@Dirk Jefferson Nah, if you give the card more power and voltage it will actually reach the clocks you set in Wattman, though the performance you gain with those overclocks compared to the extra power you're using isn't all that great, as with any overclock. The highest I had my 6600XT run at was around 2900 Mhz on the core before it got too unstable with a SPPT Softmod.
@@GewelReal I remember my GTX 750 Ti, it got around the same FPS in games as my old GTX 560 Ti while using no power connectors, vs 2 6 pins on the 560 Ti lol
@@xXValentineXx yeh i have a low profile gigabyte 1050 ti single fan without any connectors that i put in a old lenovo the thing does what i said above and still had more juice left only problem is the cpu which i am currently getting ready to order another mobo for an i7 3770s. The 1050 ran 69c 70c ish degrees Playing stuff like fh4 on maxed settings @1080p and in hzd same settings 74c
Also with amd's overclocking, your clocks will be limited by the power limit ie( if your clocks are set to 2700mhz, but your hiting a power limit, the clock wont go up until you raise the power limit) as a side note you can use a tool called morepowertool to raise the max and min on the sliders
I remembered this video recently and decided to do my own testing on how to improve GPU efficiency. Only I went about it a completely different way that paid off big time! I dialed down all the sliders in the Radeon tuning section to their minimum and then at the lowest voltage I decided to slowly increase the frequency back up until I reached as far as I could go while still being stable. Once you reach a certain point you'll have to dial the power limit back up to continue on. Just keep the voltage at minimum! Using this method on my reference RX 6800, I was able to achieve 85% of the stock frequency! This gave an over 25% improvement to performance per watt in FurMark and as much as 60% in games! Theoretically speaking, I imagine this margin grows even greater with the more powerful the GPU you use. This is considering how number of GPU cores and the larger the memory bus matters more than raw clock speeds. I'd love to see this tried on a 7900 XTX!
Did you try limiting the clock speed on the 6600 to -20? In my experience on a 5700XT, that cuts the power draw roughly in half for about 80% performance, no voltage tweaking necessary.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff heh.. Funny it's completely the opposite answer of what I got, when I said the same thing, except it was 2100 mhz, instead of - 20%, however the same point. Don't forget to undervolt, while you underclock to get even better results 😉.
Ooo goodie! Don’t expect miracles; the 6600 isn’t pushed as hard from the factory as the 5700XT was, which means it’s closer to optimal efficiency already.
@@gismo3564 What I told both of you is correct. I did try manually lowering the core frequency while undervolting. I set the card to around 2300Mhz to try and get any voltages below 1100mv to stick, but the card still kept crashing. Although when I set the voltage back to 1100mv and continued testing, I reset the core frequency to default. (In game it kept hanging around 2400Mhzish, regardless of what I did to the core frequency slider. The driver seemed to just ignore any manual core frequency input) So I didn’t test performance/power draw with a manually lowered core clock, I just used it to try and get a more aggressive undervolt stable which didn’t work. Haha! Hopefully this clears it up. 😂
@@FriENTlyFire Yeah dude The 2600 was a nice budget CPU at the time, but I upgraded from one to a 5600 about 2 weeks ago and it gave my RX 570 a massive boost. Considering the 6600 is twice the performance of an RX 570, you'll see an enormous improvement by making an upgrade.
@@steveqi9309 You can be CPU bound by Single threaded performance or by IPC, CPU clock speeds or RAM configuration, doesn't necessarily have to be from high CPU usage, also if the GPU isn't fully utilized (97%+) and it's not the hardware it could also be poor game optimization or driver related.
I loved the 5000 series GPUs because you could push a 5700XT to be faster than a 2080 and use 250w. Or you could basically run fanless at 60w on alot of older games
One thing I've found with cards that are tricky to effectively limit the power on is that if you limit the frame rate instead, you can get satisfactory power reductions. Limiting the frame rate to the same level as the A2000 may have resulted in a closer match, though it looks like the 6600's advantage in GTA V wouldn't give enough headroom for this to make much of a difference.
i have a sapphire rx6600, and it's night and day compared to my 3050. with the undervolt i've put on it, it never throttles inside of a deskmeet b660, and i have to run benchmarks to even get it above 78C. it's a great card, the only thing i miss from NVIDIA is stability and custom resolutions - the 6600 has a tendency to crash when upscaling and alt-tabbing.
Reminds me of the time when I was messing around with RX580 and 5700XT. Those would undervolt like crazy and ramp up the efficiency quite a bit... but it would also come with some framerate hit if I tried to maximize efficiency (which was fine, as they usually didn't affect the gameplay). Still couldn't catch up to the 1660 and 3060 I have owned though, which was trickier to undervolt but incredibly efficient from the get go.
This video opens the door to another question... Could a RX 6500 XT be power-throttled to the point where it could be powered exclusively by the PCI-X slot?
If I remember correctly PCs won't boot with a GPU that are not connected to power if they normally need power cables. Would be nice though if every GPU had a 75W mode. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a 75W 3060 wouldn't perform roughly the same as the MSRP-wise more expensive A2000 as both chips are essentially GA106 and we can't have that. (75W GA107 3040 to replace the 1650 pls...)
RX 6600 is bottlenecked by the power limit, so overclocking does not make any difference. If I unlock my power limit to 120% I easily gain another 10% fps. So when undervolting, instead of reducing power consumption, you're actually increasing the clock speeds. What might actually make this card more efficient is an undervolt combined with underclocking
Actually limiting the max frequency in Adrenaline gives you a way bigger reduction in power consumed than can be set with the power slider, and for just a moderate decrease in FPS, if it's efficiency you seek...
Using More Power Tool (MPT) you can lower RDNA2 voltage to 650mV and clocks to around 1400Mhz, this is where there is the most efficiency in my experience. Almost double the stock FPS/Watt. You also can extend the power limits lower and higher with MPT. You also need to test power consumption at the wall, as others have pointed out. I'd love for this to be expanded because I've done some testing with 6800xt, 6700xt, and 6800m, all to see peak efficiency for off grid gaming.
When it comes to tuning rx 6000 gpus, it seems that setting the maximum and minimum clock at 100mhz apart (for example 2500min and 2600max) improves stability a fair bit. It lets you do a bit more in term of overclocking or undervolting before the gpu becomes unstable. The youtuber "ancient gameplays" has a pretty comprehensive video on this. Also, it is worth noting that when it comes to power efficiency, it is highly beneficial to underclock the gpu. Every gpu that I have tested so far was clocked pretty significantly past its efficiency window. Reducing the clocks by for example 100mhz leads to a significant decrease in power consumption, while not having a proportionally negative effect on fps. I tried this on a Sapphire 6650xt nitro+ which can draw up to 203 watts in performance mode. I paired it with a 12400 and measured power draw at the wall, since according to Igors Lab the read outs of programms are pretty inaccurate, especially for amd. Tldr: With undervolting and underclocking, my total system power usage went from 265 watts average to 158 watts average while loosing arount 11% performance in the heaven bench mark. Sucks to loose performance, but good to know you can tweak cards towards efficiency pretty far with very little effort. Would be awesome though to get a video of you using the morepower tool to reach max efficiency :D
Power limit slider is useless in these cards. You need to reduce the max frequency of the card to e.g. 2200 MHz and you start to see the power usage drop. You lose 10% performance but your power consumption will drop a lot more. Also the minimum frequency should be 100-200 MHz less than the max frequency to keep the clocks more stable.
Running FoldingAtHome can be a great way to test the power efficiency of the card for computing tasks. Folding puts the GPUs under a very heavy load and that can be used to test the card's thermal performance. Since FoldingAtHome also awards points depending on how fast the GPU completes the process, you can also calculate it PPW(Point-Per-Watt).
it is what I've been saying since last year when I got myself a 6600xt. But not a single person in the comments would believe me, because no big youtuber talked about it. the 6600xt is the best card when it comes to FPS/efficiency
I am wondering if underclocking & even more undervolting will bump the efficiency of the RX6600 at all, as AMD cards are clocked very high to be competitive, but their sweet spot frequency for efficiency could be much lower (guessing under 2000Mhz). Additionally, if the card is slightly underclocked, it might not need a high memory frequency to keep it well fed with data (memory underclock), which could in turn make its efficiency even better.
Maybe do a video making a super efficient gaming pc? Super efficient CPU GPU combo and an appropriate screen to match? Really enjoyed this video though !
Hmmm... What about unplugging the 6-pin connector? Then you will be forcing the GPU down to the 75W from the PCIe slot. I would be really curious if the card would be able to run that way...
I have the exact same rx 6600 model, powercolor hellhound, I got it for a very fair price, really happy to see its efficiency and insane amount of fps it gives, we love rdna2, nice video dawid, keep it up!
MSI's Mech 6600 vbios is practically identical to this one, and i think it's already undervolted as far as they're comfortable with - remember this card is supposed to be 132W not 100W. compared to my EVGA 3060, the efficiency of this thing is just absurd. the 6600 XT and 6900 XT are also incredibly efficient if tuned well.
Idle curiosity: What if you pull the power connector from the RX6600 so it can only draw power from the PCIe connector? Maybe no life, maybe horrible instability, maybe flames! ...or maybe that will force the card in to a low power mode to prevent drawing too much from the motherboard.
Very interesting video! If you’re doing a follow-up, could you also overclock/undervolt the A2000 further? Also I think the 6600 XT will actually be more efficient if you can undervolt the crap out of it with morepowertool.
Yep, the RX 6600 is quite impressive from a performance per Watt perspective, though if you want the best RDNA2 card in that respect you should check out the RX 6800 non-XT. According to the powertests Igors Lab did the non-XT Version of the 6800 basically consumes power like a 3060ti (so around 200-210W board power stock, though with a bit of undervolting it can get even lower then that) while, depending on the game, performing like or even above a 3070ti. So in terms of FPS per Watt the RX 6800 non-XT is almost twice as efficient as any other card according to his charts. Edit: One tip for Over- and Underclocking AMD cards, keep the Core sliders for min and max Frequency within 100 Mhz of each other, otherwise they won't do much because by only moving the max slider you're basically just telling the card the upper boost limit but due to the min slider beeing too low it won't actually try to boost that high.
5:56 You're doing it wrong! Don't undervolt with sliders! By undervolting with sliders you make the GPU crash by lowering the lowest power states (because the lower ones are more susceptible to crashing), but you want to undervolt the highest power state - the full performance power state. You could've used the knobs in advanced mode in WattMan or even MSI Afterburner's voltage/frequency curve! MSI Afterburner info: The voltage/frequency curve actually works and can reduces state 7 voltage (or whichever state is the highest one). IIRC I've reduced the power consumption of my RX 580 by about 1/3rd without dropping its clock speed by a significant amount. If you want, you can also reduce other power states with the voltage slider, but the slider won't reduce the highest power state voltage as much as the curve does. That's because the slider reduces all voltages at once (same as in WattMan), while the curve allows you to fine-tune each power state without dropping the lowest state below the crashing point (same as advanced mode in WattMan). On the contrary, the frequency curve only increases the highest power state's frequency (also in both programs, I think). MSI Afterburner guide: 1. Start by undervolting with the voltage slider as low as the card can take it without changing the frequencies. This decreases the voltage of all power states at once, including the lowest one. The voltage/frequency curve can't reduce the lowest one (on my GPU). This step is only important if you want to decrease idle and V-sync power usage. 2. Reduce all the frequencies with the frequency curve to allow more undervolting if you wish. The frequency slider only affects the highest power state. 3. Don't touch the frequency slider, it's not needed. When you can't bring the voltage slider down any more, reduce just the highest power state's voltage with the voltage curve. It probably has a minimum voltage, under which changing the curve won't bring the high state voltage down any more (this could be tweakable by changing the BIOS). 4. Keep reducing the highest power state frequency with the curve to allow more undervolting on the highest power state curve. 5. There you have it. You've (probably) successfully undervolted all power states, while undervolting the highest power state much more than the lower ones. Note: the sliders and the curve complement each other but don't display the sum effect in their numbers. For example, -50mV on the slider and -50mV on the curve results in -100mV, but each one still shows -50mV.
I really have no idea why you didn't think to *underclock* the card in addition to undervolting Overclocking as-is already means exponentially more power consumption, for a linear improvement in performance
I pegged my laptop 2070 Max-Q to 1185mhz and it uses 70w or less whilst gaming and in conjunction with disabling turbo boost I've been getting ±60fps gaming experience in resident evil 7 at 1440p max Ray Tracing (with interlacing) The reason I'm doing this is to conserve power on my campervan battery.
Also note that Resident Evil 7 RE Engine is an optimization beast. That thing runs amazing in lots of configurations. Capcom really nailed it with that one
@@Chronologo Oh 100%, same with all of them to be honest! Love these games so much. Can't wait for Resi 4 remake! I figured as long as I can have a 60fps 1080p experience I'm good and I worked out total system draw is probably around 100w or thereabouts which should enable me about 4 and a half hours worth of gaming assuming the sun has gone. Using the laptop screen I can probably save some more power and use 1080p more. Just have to see if I can change the screen for 144hz to 60hz to save more power
yep, your 2070 super max q is no less efficient than these desktop GPU-s. 3000 laptop cards are even more efficient, so this guy was wrong when he was talking about "the most efficient GPU on the market" because that's the laptop 3080 ti.
The rx 6800 (non XT) normally rates really high for efficiency, and only pull about 215w by default. They use a really low mv by default and have the 128mb infinity cache. I think they might beat the rx 6600 in many efficiency tests with undervolting as many miners achieved great results doing.
If you are going for max efficiency, you actually need to lower the clock speed of the gpu instead of overclock. I found that on a 6700xt you can go down to 75% gpu clock (about 75% performance) and it cut power consumption in half from 180w to less than 90w. Idk if it was just that card, but it is worth a shot. I hope Dawid sees this
A couple of comments on this one already, but the RX 6400 is another low power option, TDP of 53W and tested on Tom's Hardware at 53.7W. However, it's just not as fast as the A2000, so the lower power might not be enough.
AIB cards are all a little bit different. For example: the hellhound is pretty locked down, while the gigabyte eagle allows for slightly more undervolting (minimum 773mv). The best undervolting options that I have seen are on the Sapphire Pulse (I can get mine down to 646mv).
I've undervolted my RX 6700 XT from 1.2V to 1.12V. It never passes over 200W (in Furmark reports 199W, in games it's closer to 150-160W). I'm in general really impressed from effectiveness of Navi cards, as it's really nice - at least compared to some terrible older AMD cards (R9 290X and R9 390X, we all remember). Really hoping, that next generation will kickass in this aspect, especially after all the RTX4xxx power consumption rumours.
@@ledoynier3694 I thought RAM allocation was dynamic? 6:19 dynamic RAM allocation would explain why the numbers changed by a few MB on this part of the game. If the A2000 system has been over allocated(unused) 3GB of RAM why would it bother to change the counter by a few MB?
Hi Dawid, I have been watching your LP GPU video's and I was wondering if you could help me find a more efficient Graphics card for power than the a2000. I live in an area where power is incredibly expensive, so I have never had a GPU. I have been using UHD intel graphics my entire gaming lifetime.
The a2000 is very expensive as it costs more than a 3060ti and less than the 3070. Do the math to figure out how long you would have to keep your computer on before the cheaper graphics card becomes too expensive due to power. The quadro T1000 is expensive but uses 50 watts A used 1050ti is cheap but uses 75 watts just like the a2000 The rx6400 is new and cheap, but without pcie gen 4, its bad
You should try with a much higher end card. At lower power draws the more cores (CUDA or your regional equivalent) will give you more performance per watt - which is why high end laptop GPUs are insanely efficient. Also from my own experiments I was able to get a 2070s down to about the power draw of a 1660ti with some 30% more performance.
the 6600 has gotten a lot better from my understanding since its release, there was some major driver changes and the new amd thing that helped all 6000 series with preformance(i forget what its called)
For anyone with a gaming laptop with horrible cooling, undervolting is probably the best thing you can do to improve your performance if your temps are high.
Perhaps they're already pushing the 6600 as much as they can on the power envelope it's at. Granted, that's not the nicest model, so it's possible it's not got a great binning to begin with.
I don't know why it would limit how low you can cap the power draw. I have a 6900XT but only a 650w PSU, so naturally I capped it. However I can go up to + or - 15%. Granted, that card consumes 300w.
Does msi afterburner work with that amd card? I have power limit set for my 1660 super at 56% and it decreases power draw from 120-130w to 70-75w at most losing like 10% performance
And then it happened... Be Quiet joined the unicornbarf game... never thought It would happen - but then again Noctua can now be had in "not a piece of poop rotating in a frame of mayonnaise" colors so - guess anything is possible now!
You need to set lower clock speed to allow GPU core run in more optimal part of V/F curve. This curve is not linear, at lower clocks card will gain efficiency due lower voltage. No need to decrease voltage slider, it's not fixed value. You might even need to increase slider if voltage drops too much at lower clocks. Also overclocking will increase voltage because new higher clock speed is higher on the curve. Very similar to Zen3 CPUs, highly dynamic and voltage follows clock speed. I'd use HWInfo or GPUz to monitor GPU voltage.
My settings on my rx 6600 is 1.075V and 2Ghz, it consumes 50W max at -20% performance, 2.08FPS/W equivalent on the GTA one. Could probably reduce a bit more voltage or whatever for better power consumption since i only bought it because my former GPU was broken and in most cases only need 10-20% of its performance.
I ended up not doing the needed research and ended up with my current PC with these specs. 12th gen Intel core i9 16GB DDR4 GT 1030 1TB SSD and a 180 watt power supply... I need a GPU that won't kill my PC (It needs to be as power effective as possible) but I want the best performance possible too. I was thinking of getting an RX6600 because I think they only draw 100 watts under load.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
It's worth noting that NVIDIA and AMD report power usage differently through software, so it's not really 100% comparable. It's better to have a physical measurement of power draw using something like the NVIDIA PCAT instead.
as he said
Only Measures how much PC is pulling out form wall are realisable. Due different GPU drivers stress cpu in different manner.
Exactly! Many people don't realize amd is pulling more then the let on! I find it funny the real knowledgeable have all explained how it works. Yet people still want to act like ita 200watts to 250watts eveb at the high end.
@@reviewforthetube6485 Yeah, that's unrealistic, unless you undervolt.
True story...my 6600xt is usually drawing about 20% more watts at the wall using a killawatt plug. Wattman is way off
You should build a "green pc" that is super power efficient. Kinda like the one LTT made a couple years ago
i have got a gtx 1070 undervolted and underclocked pulling around 85w down from the stock 140w if i leave the card at stock, plus my old haswell i7 pulls around 50w during gaming. From the wall i measured 175w total power draw while running dying light 2 which i find to be pretty damn efficient for the performance of the system as it runs great at 1080p and i only lose about 7fps typically.
Green pc = no pc
@@JudeTheRUclipsPoopersubscribe yea Pascal was nuts when it came to power efficiency, even the 1080 (the launch flagship) still only needed a single 8-pin, which I still find impressive
Agreed. I'm super horny for super efficient builds. Something about optimization gets me going.
@@exaltedb it's also amazing how much you can tweak pascal cards. I mean I managed to get -200mv and dropped the core down 100mhz to 1760mhz and it's stable and running great and barely lost any performance. You definitely can't do the same thing with an ampere card without it crashing and being unstable.
From my experience, using RX 6600 XT and RX 6800. You have to set the minimum frequency to 100mhz lower than max value. The frequency keeps fluctuating if the min is kept at stock value (i think it was 500mhz). Do not worry, on idle, it will not stay at the min frequency, it will downclock to very low value.
Nope: it can hurt 6600 XT's performance by around 20%. Try comparing Furmark benchmark scores
No. Best performance is somewhere in between. Idk why, but amd overclocking is just wierd. (Source: did a lot of tinkering with 69xt, from 180 watts, to 500+)
I did also spend a bit of time playing around with the min value. Sorry I should have more clearly showed it in the video. 👍
@@DawidDoesTechStuff on my 6900xt efficiency improved when not hitting power limits. Lowering max clock helps too. I ran it at 180w with significantly more than stock performance. RDNA 2 OC is like voodoo magic 🤦♂️. Let's hope rdna 3 is a bit less wierd.
@@b127_1 Haha!! It did really feel like Voodoo magic when I was playing around with it. Let’s just say the weirdness gives it character. 😅
You can use the morepowertool to do much more tweaking to the 6600. Lower to power limit to whatever you want, also undervolting the memory.
This.
Oh cool! That’s a great suggestion, I’ll check it out. 👍
@@DawidDoesTechStuff in case more power tool doesn't work with your AIB model, you can just save the mpt profile as a dot reg file and then run it as admin.
In case you are unfamiliar with morepowertool, reply to this message i will explain in more detail. I have a 6600 as well. Was able to overclock it way past an rtx 3060 using mpt.
I use more power tool on my 6800xt to get more fps and lower heat at same time. Also to mine with low power draw while not gaming.
@@BlueThunder1965 best I could get from my rx6800 was 118w at 62mh/s undervolted as much as I could and thats my daily work from home rig too
Cant wait for the next video, where Dawid will compare the most INEFFICIENT GPU's of Nvidia and AMD. Good job man!
GTX 480 and R9 Fury, R9 Fury X and even the furnace R9 295X2 or R9 390
"RX 6950XT has 335W max wattage"
A saw some tests where it reaches +400W
@@daemonx867 4090 chillin at 600 watts
@@ShadyHero Where did you see the 4090 using 600W? Give the the link
Funnily enough they talked about this on DF direct the other week and they concluded that software optimisation is the fly in the ointment with trying to quantify this sort of thing!
I agree. This kind of thing is very difficult to very accurately determine.
Dawid, you have to up the Minimum framerate in AMD Adrenaline to get actual forced OC.
I did also use that slider, sorry I should have more clearly showed it in the video. 👍
@@DawidDoesTechStuff try underclocking, when I set my msi 6600 to 2200mhz I go from 100watts to 60 watts and I don't really notice a fps difference
I think you weren't getting any higher clocks when moving the slider because you were hitting power limit, if you moved the power limit slider to the right, it would let the card reach the clocks you want it to, but then again that's against the point of the video because you're increasing wattage for minimal gains probably.
Yeah, that’s kinda what I was thinking. The card just didn’t have any more performance to give with that power draw.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff There is 1 more thing you can do to squeeze the absolute limit of the card. Take out those RGB lighting on the GPU . It shares the same power budget with the entire card. Since your Nvidia A2000 doesn't have any lighting, the RX6600 should be the same too.
@@fleurdewin7958 whole 0.1W lol
@Dirk Jefferson Nah, if you give the card more power and voltage it will actually reach the clocks you set in Wattman, though the performance you gain with those overclocks compared to the extra power you're using isn't all that great, as with any overclock. The highest I had my 6600XT run at was around 2900 Mhz on the core before it got too unstable with a SPPT Softmod.
man I miss the 10 series, I remember how damn efficient it was compared to anything that came before or after
Maxwell also was mindblowingly efficient
@@GewelReal I remember my GTX 750 Ti, it got around the same FPS in games as my old GTX 560 Ti while using no power connectors, vs 2 6 pins on the 560 Ti lol
1050 ti da best
@@floridamangonwild i had a 1050ti without 6pin that was mindblowing XD
@@xXValentineXx yeh i have a low profile gigabyte 1050 ti single fan without any connectors that i put in a old lenovo the thing does what i said above and still had more juice left only problem is the cpu which i am currently getting ready to order another mobo for an i7 3770s. The 1050 ran 69c 70c ish degrees Playing stuff like fh4 on maxed settings @1080p and in hzd same settings 74c
You can use "more power tool" to reduce the power draw further. You may be able to get down to 50ish watt or something like that.
You could set a framerate cap. It would reduce the power usage and improve frame times, which looked pretty choppy on the A2000 graph.
Dawid, I just wanted to say you are a great human being and I appreciate your videos.
Thank you! I really appreciate that, and I hope you have a good day. 😃
Simping hard
@@denis2381 it’s not being a Simp when you appreciate the work of others. It’s called being a decent human being.
@@Brando1444 actually it is called simping
@@denis2381 I don't think you know what simping means.
Also with amd's overclocking, your clocks will be limited by the power limit ie( if your clocks are set to 2700mhz, but your hiting a power limit, the clock wont go up until you raise the power limit) as a side note you can use a tool called morepowertool to raise the max and min on the sliders
1:51 when he said "drop the a2000" my brain went "DADDY LINUS???"
I remembered this video recently and decided to do my own testing on how to improve GPU efficiency. Only I went about it a completely different way that paid off big time!
I dialed down all the sliders in the Radeon tuning section to their minimum and then at the lowest voltage I decided to slowly increase the frequency back up until I reached as far as I could go while still being stable. Once you reach a certain point you'll have to dial the power limit back up to continue on. Just keep the voltage at minimum!
Using this method on my reference RX 6800, I was able to achieve 85% of the stock frequency! This gave an over 25% improvement to performance per watt in FurMark and as much as 60% in games!
Theoretically speaking, I imagine this margin grows even greater with the more powerful the GPU you use. This is considering how number of GPU cores and the larger the memory bus matters more than raw clock speeds. I'd love to see this tried on a 7900 XTX!
Did you try limiting the clock speed on the 6600 to -20? In my experience on a 5700XT, that cuts the power draw roughly in half for about 80% performance, no voltage tweaking necessary.
I did not try that. That’s an interesting suggestion. I’ll go give that a try.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff heh.. Funny it's completely the opposite answer of what I got, when I said the same thing, except it was 2100 mhz, instead of - 20%, however the same point. Don't forget to undervolt, while you underclock to get even better results 😉.
Ooo goodie! Don’t expect miracles; the 6600 isn’t pushed as hard from the factory as the 5700XT was, which means it’s closer to optimal efficiency already.
@@gismo3564 What I told both of you is correct. I did try manually lowering the core frequency while undervolting. I set the card to around 2300Mhz to try and get any voltages below 1100mv to stick, but the card still kept crashing. Although when I set the voltage back to 1100mv and continued testing, I reset the core frequency to default. (In game it kept hanging around 2400Mhzish, regardless of what I did to the core frequency slider. The driver seemed to just ignore any manual core frequency input)
So I didn’t test performance/power draw with a manually lowered core clock, I just used it to try and get a more aggressive undervolt stable which didn’t work. Haha! Hopefully this clears it up. 😂
@@DawidDoesTechStuff 🤓
Seem to be slightly CPU bound at times with the RX 6600 but still interesting results.
Seeing his benchmarks made me realize just how CPU bottlenecked my 6600 is in some of my games (paired with Ryzen 2600)
@@FriENTlyFire yeah you gotta change asap
@@FriENTlyFire Yeah dude
The 2600 was a nice budget CPU at the time, but I upgraded from one to a 5600 about 2 weeks ago and it gave my RX 570 a massive boost.
Considering the 6600 is twice the performance of an RX 570, you'll see an enormous improvement by making an upgrade.
i don't think it was, the 3700X never reached 90%, the 6600 was always near 90%. Looks like it's GPU bound to me.
@@steveqi9309 You can be CPU bound by Single threaded performance or by IPC, CPU clock speeds or RAM configuration, doesn't necessarily have to be from high CPU usage, also if the GPU isn't fully utilized (97%+) and it's not the hardware it could also be poor game optimization or driver related.
I loved the 5000 series GPUs because you could push a 5700XT to be faster than a 2080 and use 250w. Or you could basically run fanless at 60w on alot of older games
One thing I've found with cards that are tricky to effectively limit the power on is that if you limit the frame rate instead, you can get satisfactory power reductions. Limiting the frame rate to the same level as the A2000 may have resulted in a closer match, though it looks like the 6600's advantage in GTA V wouldn't give enough headroom for this to make much of a difference.
i have a sapphire rx6600, and it's night and day compared to my 3050. with the undervolt i've put on it, it never throttles inside of a deskmeet b660, and i have to run benchmarks to even get it above 78C. it's a great card, the only thing i miss from NVIDIA is stability and custom resolutions - the 6600 has a tendency to crash when upscaling and alt-tabbing.
Crashing because you have unstable undervolting.
Lmao user issue, not nvida and amd issue. Use a stock 6600 and never had a problem.
I really like these efficiency-based videos
Reminds me of the time when I was messing around with RX580 and 5700XT. Those would undervolt like crazy and ramp up the efficiency quite a bit... but it would also come with some framerate hit if I tried to maximize efficiency (which was fine, as they usually didn't affect the gameplay). Still couldn't catch up to the 1660 and 3060 I have owned though, which was trickier to undervolt but incredibly efficient from the get go.
Although the A2000 is factory undervolted, I wonder if it can be manually undervolted some more and what the results would be.
DLSS, frame capping, and some PPT lowering and underclocking can also help.
This video opens the door to another question... Could a RX 6500 XT be power-throttled to the point where it could be powered exclusively by the PCI-X slot?
If I remember correctly PCs won't boot with a GPU that are not connected to power if they normally need power cables. Would be nice though if every GPU had a 75W mode. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a 75W 3060 wouldn't perform roughly the same as the MSRP-wise more expensive A2000 as both chips are essentially GA106 and we can't have that. (75W GA107 3040 to replace the 1650 pls...)
RX 6600 is bottlenecked by the power limit, so overclocking does not make any difference. If I unlock my power limit to 120% I easily gain another 10% fps. So when undervolting, instead of reducing power consumption, you're actually increasing the clock speeds. What might actually make this card more efficient is an undervolt combined with underclocking
In my experience, somewhere above 100fps GTAV will soon become CPU bound on a single thread, making GPU changes become much less relevant.
Actually limiting the max frequency in Adrenaline gives you a way bigger reduction in power consumed than can be set with the power slider, and for just a moderate decrease in FPS, if it's efficiency you seek...
Using More Power Tool (MPT) you can lower RDNA2 voltage to 650mV and clocks to around 1400Mhz, this is where there is the most efficiency in my experience. Almost double the stock FPS/Watt. You also can extend the power limits lower and higher with MPT.
You also need to test power consumption at the wall, as others have pointed out.
I'd love for this to be expanded because I've done some testing with 6800xt, 6700xt, and 6800m, all to see peak efficiency for off grid gaming.
Green PCs are new gaming Metas.
Gotta slap that Energy Star logo on your PC
Amazing idea for the video! Let's watch!
When it comes to tuning rx 6000 gpus, it seems that setting the maximum and minimum clock at 100mhz apart (for example 2500min and 2600max) improves stability a fair bit. It lets you do a bit more in term of overclocking or undervolting before the gpu becomes unstable. The youtuber "ancient gameplays" has a pretty comprehensive video on this.
Also, it is worth noting that when it comes to power efficiency, it is highly beneficial to underclock the gpu. Every gpu that I have tested so far was clocked pretty significantly past its efficiency window. Reducing the clocks by for example 100mhz leads to a significant decrease in power consumption, while not having a proportionally negative effect on fps.
I tried this on a Sapphire 6650xt nitro+ which can draw up to 203 watts in performance mode.
I paired it with a 12400 and measured power draw at the wall, since according to Igors Lab the read outs of programms are pretty inaccurate, especially for amd.
Tldr: With undervolting and underclocking, my total system power usage went from 265 watts average to 158 watts average while loosing arount 11% performance in the heaven bench mark.
Sucks to loose performance, but good to know you can tweak cards towards efficiency pretty far with very little effort.
Would be awesome though to get a video of you using the morepower tool to reach max efficiency :D
Power limit slider is useless in these cards. You need to reduce the max frequency of the card to e.g. 2200 MHz and you start to see the power usage drop. You lose 10% performance but your power consumption will drop a lot more. Also the minimum frequency should be 100-200 MHz less than the max frequency to keep the clocks more stable.
Running FoldingAtHome can be a great way to test the power efficiency of the card for computing tasks. Folding puts the GPUs under a very heavy load and that can be used to test the card's thermal performance. Since FoldingAtHome also awards points depending on how fast the GPU completes the process, you can also calculate it PPW(Point-Per-Watt).
it is what I've been saying since last year when I got myself a 6600xt. But not a single person in the comments would believe me, because no big youtuber talked about it.
the 6600xt is the best card when it comes to FPS/efficiency
your right my 6600xt was a monster at mining for that reason
Not exact,HUB talked few time about it
@@dederen1492 all those videos just appeared half a year after release. I've been commenting under a lot of videos xD
I am wondering if underclocking & even more undervolting will bump the efficiency of the RX6600 at all, as AMD cards are clocked very high to be competitive, but their sweet spot frequency for efficiency could be much lower (guessing under 2000Mhz). Additionally, if the card is slightly underclocked, it might not need a high memory frequency to keep it well fed with data (memory underclock), which could in turn make its efficiency even better.
Maybe do a video making a super efficient gaming pc? Super efficient CPU GPU combo and an appropriate screen to match?
Really enjoyed this video though !
my older Polaris RX580 undervolting went from 170W to 135W, so I really can't complain, also the temps dropped a lot as well
Hmmm... What about unplugging the 6-pin connector? Then you will be forcing the GPU down to the 75W from the PCIe slot.
I would be really curious if the card would be able to run that way...
Many gpus will refuse to even boot without it nowadays
@@cloud8521 That is exactly why I think the experiment is worth it.
I appreciate the crunching of numbers with a physical pen and paper.
I have the exact same rx 6600 model, powercolor hellhound, I got it for a very fair price, really happy to see its efficiency and insane amount of fps it gives, we love rdna2, nice video dawid, keep it up!
MSI's Mech 6600 vbios is practically identical to this one, and i think it's already undervolted as far as they're comfortable with - remember this card is supposed to be 132W not 100W. compared to my EVGA 3060, the efficiency of this thing is just absurd. the 6600 XT and 6900 XT are also incredibly efficient if tuned well.
Idle curiosity:
What if you pull the power connector from the RX6600 so it can only draw power from the PCIe connector?
Maybe no life, maybe horrible instability, maybe flames!
...or maybe that will force the card in to a low power mode to prevent drawing too much from the motherboard.
Very interesting video! If you’re doing a follow-up, could you also overclock/undervolt the A2000 further? Also I think the 6600 XT will actually be more efficient if you can undervolt the crap out of it with morepowertool.
A fairly efficient card, but impressively less expensive. I have a newfound respect for the little 6600 I have as a spare GPU.
Yep, the RX 6600 is quite impressive from a performance per Watt perspective, though if you want the best RDNA2 card in that respect you should check out the RX 6800 non-XT. According to the powertests Igors Lab did the non-XT Version of the 6800 basically consumes power like a 3060ti (so around 200-210W board power stock, though with a bit of undervolting it can get even lower then that) while, depending on the game, performing like or even above a 3070ti. So in terms of FPS per Watt the RX 6800 non-XT is almost twice as efficient as any other card according to his charts.
Edit:
One tip for Over- and Underclocking AMD cards, keep the Core sliders for min and max Frequency within 100 Mhz of each other, otherwise they won't do much because by only moving the max slider you're basically just telling the card the upper boost limit but due to the min slider beeing too low it won't actually try to boost that high.
This vide got me subscribed! Keep it up! I think gettin the power reading from the wall with kill-a-watt is the way to go for the future
You should’ve tested the 6400 as well. It performs quite well (at pcie4) considering its only 40-50w
SOoooooo happy for this video, thanks Dawid!!
I remember when Dawid didn't have a sponsors ad in his videos. Miss those days.
This rx6600/6600xt shud be revived as a 5nm navi 34(7500xt) without any 6pin
75w can easily be done if AMD optimise it thoroughly
you can try underclock + undervolt, i think this will umprove the performance/watt.
5:56 You're doing it wrong! Don't undervolt with sliders!
By undervolting with sliders you make the GPU crash by lowering the lowest power states (because the lower ones are more susceptible to crashing), but you want to undervolt the highest power state - the full performance power state. You could've used the knobs in advanced mode in WattMan or even MSI Afterburner's voltage/frequency curve!
MSI Afterburner info:
The voltage/frequency curve actually works and can reduces state 7 voltage (or whichever state is the highest one). IIRC I've reduced the power consumption of my RX 580 by about 1/3rd without dropping its clock speed by a significant amount. If you want, you can also reduce other power states with the voltage slider, but the slider won't reduce the highest power state voltage as much as the curve does. That's because the slider reduces all voltages at once (same as in WattMan), while the curve allows you to fine-tune each power state without dropping the lowest state below the crashing point (same as advanced mode in WattMan). On the contrary, the frequency curve only increases the highest power state's frequency (also in both programs, I think).
MSI Afterburner guide:
1. Start by undervolting with the voltage slider as low as the card can take it without changing the frequencies. This decreases the voltage of all power states at once, including the lowest one. The voltage/frequency curve can't reduce the lowest one (on my GPU). This step is only important if you want to decrease idle and V-sync power usage.
2. Reduce all the frequencies with the frequency curve to allow more undervolting if you wish. The frequency slider only affects the highest power state.
3. Don't touch the frequency slider, it's not needed. When you can't bring the voltage slider down any more, reduce just the highest power state's voltage with the voltage curve. It probably has a minimum voltage, under which changing the curve won't bring the high state voltage down any more (this could be tweakable by changing the BIOS).
4. Keep reducing the highest power state frequency with the curve to allow more undervolting on the highest power state curve.
5. There you have it. You've (probably) successfully undervolted all power states, while undervolting the highest power state much more than the lower ones.
Note: the sliders and the curve complement each other but don't display the sum effect in their numbers. For example, -50mV on the slider and -50mV on the curve results in -100mV, but each one still shows -50mV.
I really have no idea why you didn't think to *underclock* the card in addition to undervolting
Overclocking as-is already means exponentially more power consumption, for a linear improvement in performance
Nice video ideas as always!
I pegged my laptop 2070 Max-Q to 1185mhz and it uses 70w or less whilst gaming and in conjunction with disabling turbo boost I've been getting ±60fps gaming experience in resident evil 7 at 1440p max Ray Tracing (with interlacing)
The reason I'm doing this is to conserve power on my campervan battery.
Also note that Resident Evil 7 RE Engine is an optimization beast. That thing runs amazing in lots of configurations. Capcom really nailed it with that one
@@Chronologo Oh 100%, same with all of them to be honest! Love these games so much. Can't wait for Resi 4 remake! I figured as long as I can have a 60fps 1080p experience I'm good and I worked out total system draw is probably around 100w or thereabouts which should enable me about 4 and a half hours worth of gaming assuming the sun has gone.
Using the laptop screen I can probably save some more power and use 1080p more. Just have to see if I can change the screen for 144hz to 60hz to save more power
yep, your 2070 super max q is no less efficient than these desktop GPU-s. 3000 laptop cards are even more efficient, so this guy was wrong when he was talking about "the most efficient GPU on the market" because that's the laptop 3080 ti.
Great content, good job!👍
Any test site where one can find what older games are optimised for (AMD or Nvidia)? Like, what brand supports a heavily modded Skyrim the best.
The rx 6800 (non XT) normally rates really high for efficiency, and only pull about 215w by default. They use a really low mv by default and have the 128mb infinity cache. I think they might beat the rx 6600 in many efficiency tests with undervolting as many miners achieved great results doing.
The chip from the 6600 is more efficient but the memory and other components aren't, I guess thats why you can match the 60w from the nvidia.
Dawid your low-key a cool dude. I love and appreciate your content
If you are going for max efficiency, you actually need to lower the clock speed of the gpu instead of overclock. I found that on a 6700xt you can go down to 75% gpu clock (about 75% performance) and it cut power consumption in half from 180w to less than 90w. Idk if it was just that card, but it is worth a shot. I hope Dawid sees this
Just lower the in game video settings and you get HUGE fps/wat gain
A couple of comments on this one already, but the RX 6400 is another low power option, TDP of 53W and tested on Tom's Hardware at 53.7W. However, it's just not as fast as the A2000, so the lower power might not be enough.
The main difference could be the EULA (end user license agreement) which forbids the use of consumer GPUs for some business applications.
Hi Dave can you check the MSI Afterburner Voltage curve editor to undervolt the A2000?
Enjoying the escaped wolves around vancuver :)
This made me feel more confident about my RX 6600
AIB cards are all a little bit different. For example: the hellhound is pretty locked down, while the gigabyte eagle allows for slightly more undervolting (minimum 773mv). The best undervolting options that I have seen are on the Sapphire Pulse (I can get mine down to 646mv).
I've undervolted my RX 6700 XT from 1.2V to 1.12V. It never passes over 200W (in Furmark reports 199W, in games it's closer to 150-160W). I'm in general really impressed from effectiveness of Navi cards, as it's really nice - at least compared to some terrible older AMD cards (R9 290X and R9 390X, we all remember). Really hoping, that next generation will kickass in this aspect, especially after all the RTX4xxx power consumption rumours.
6:14 Why is the A2000 system RAM usage up at 12GB where as the RX 6600 only uses 9GB on exactly the same scene?
it's memory allocation, not ram usage. the game reserves a certain quantity of ram (what is reported) even if in practice it uses a LOT less.
@@ledoynier3694 I thought RAM allocation was dynamic? 6:19 dynamic RAM allocation would explain why the numbers changed by a few MB on this part of the game. If the A2000 system has been over allocated(unused) 3GB of RAM why would it bother to change the counter by a few MB?
Hey how does this Nvidia 2FPS per watts compare to AMD rx6400??
Hello! Is there a difference between PCIe 3 vs 4 on RTX A2000 for gaming?
Dawid always produces quality content 👊
exactly
@@fv101 no he doesn't. When he's on the toilet, what's he producing then? 🙂
waste isn't content 😐
Hi Dawid, I have been watching your LP GPU video's and I was wondering if you could help me find a more efficient Graphics card for power than the a2000. I live in an area where power is incredibly expensive, so I have never had a GPU. I have been using UHD intel graphics my entire gaming lifetime.
The a2000 is very expensive as it costs more than a 3060ti and less than the 3070. Do the math to figure out how long you would have to keep your computer on before the cheaper graphics card becomes too expensive due to power.
The quadro T1000 is expensive but uses 50 watts
A used 1050ti is cheap but uses 75 watts just like the a2000
The rx6400 is new and cheap, but without pcie gen 4, its bad
Perfect things and perfect video good job dude.
You should try with a much higher end card. At lower power draws the more cores (CUDA or your regional equivalent) will give you more performance per watt - which is why high end laptop GPUs are insanely efficient. Also from my own experiments I was able to get a 2070s down to about the power draw of a 1660ti with some 30% more performance.
finally a reasonable comment. pity it's so few under this video
3060ti here, 110w 8500 score in timespy, so roughly 3060 desktop scores. Impressive when compared to stock GPUs at least haha.
the 6600 has gotten a lot better from my understanding since its release, there was some major driver changes and the new amd thing that helped all 6000 series with preformance(i forget what its called)
What is your room temperature & what cpu did you used? how can your CPU run at 5x degree celcius?
Dawid, doing tech stuff... classic
Hey it's you again!
aww but it ended too soon!
You can use MPT to adjust the power % higher or lower.
For anyone with a gaming laptop with horrible cooling, undervolting is probably the best thing you can do to improve your performance if your temps are high.
Me gaming on a 3080 ti: Yes, efficiency is now more important than ever with the ever rising energy prices.
you'd be surprised at how little FPS you'd lose by reducing power limits :)the energy gains on high end cards are even more impressive.
Perhaps they're already pushing the 6600 as much as they can on the power envelope it's at. Granted, that's not the nicest model, so it's possible it's not got a great binning to begin with.
I currently use an XFX rx6600. It's indeed a very efficient mid-range GPU with only 100w max power draw.
I don't know why it would limit how low you can cap the power draw. I have a 6900XT but only a 650w PSU, so naturally I capped it. However I can go up to + or - 15%. Granted, that card consumes 300w.
I feel like watching Dawid is have a cautionary tale about what not to do to your machines...
Motherboard makers needs to make the PCI slots with controllable power settings allowing us to put more power through the bus then it does now.
Does msi afterburner work with that amd card? I have power limit set for my 1660 super at 56% and it decreases power draw from 120-130w to 70-75w at most losing like 10% performance
TLDR: your results may vary.
I have the 6600 and I tried the exact things you tried and obtained the same results 😂
Best configuration is already the out of the box one
now all you need to do is to crank down that power limit for the A2000 to 28%
1:17 yea the core runs at a mere 562 _mhz,_ not even close to a normal RTX card’s frequency
And then it happened... Be Quiet joined the unicornbarf game... never thought It would happen - but then again Noctua can now be had in "not a piece of poop rotating in a frame of mayonnaise" colors so - guess anything is possible now!
7:54 that's some frame pacing consistency
You need to set lower clock speed to allow GPU core run in more optimal part of V/F curve. This curve is not linear, at lower clocks card will gain efficiency due lower voltage. No need to decrease voltage slider, it's not fixed value. You might even need to increase slider if voltage drops too much at lower clocks. Also overclocking will increase voltage because new higher clock speed is higher on the curve. Very similar to Zen3 CPUs, highly dynamic and voltage follows clock speed. I'd use HWInfo or GPUz to monitor GPU voltage.
My settings on my rx 6600 is 1.075V and 2Ghz, it consumes 50W max at -20% performance, 2.08FPS/W equivalent on the GTA one.
Could probably reduce a bit more voltage or whatever for better power consumption since i only bought it because my former GPU was broken and in most cases only need 10-20% of its performance.
My 6800xt is undervolted with a 10% underclock and uses 175w playing bf 2042 at 3440x1440
I lose about 8% fps but drop 20 degrees on the gpu
My point being, underclock the gpu and it will draw less power to sustain the clocks, losing performance but maybe bringing the fps/w closer
What gpu is better performance wise? I’m split between getting a used a2000 or 6600 as the a2000 is only £20 more?
Note that amd's and Nvidia's software power reporting varies drastically, best is to measure from wall
I ended up not doing the needed research and ended up with my current PC with these specs.
12th gen Intel core i9
16GB DDR4
GT 1030
1TB SSD
and a 180 watt power supply...
I need a GPU that won't kill my PC (It needs to be as power effective as possible) but I want the best performance possible too.
I was thinking of getting an RX6600 because I think they only draw 100 watts under load.