PCA Forums

Good explainer on how auto limiters (voltage, power, temp) work on modern video cards, and how to read some of the more arcane indicators in GPU-Z. Basically modern cards work a lot like modern CPUs now. They all do boost clocks (automatic factory overclock) but your clock speed will be throttled if you hit one of the hard limiters.

As an aside, he also clearly demonstrates why you always want to use separate dedicated power cables to the video card, and not daisy chains. The card knows when it's maxing out one of the power connectors, but if you're daisy chaining you could easily exceed the max current of the cable and even burn up a power cable on modern cards that can draw over 100 watts per power connector.

This video reminds me of when I discovered a while back (and posted here) that my old GTX 1080 was being throttled because the factory fan curve wasn't aggressive enough.

Wow. Great explanation on the voltage, and adjustments. So in a nutshell, you don't want to use "startup" in afterburner, but feel free to adjust the other settings. I was hoping he would talk a bit about the fan speed adjustment - if you should tweak the setting.

In other videos he always recommends turning the fans up because, as was the case with my GTX 1080, the factory fan curves weren't enough to keep it from hitting thermal limits. Manufacturers tend to set their fan curves to reduce noise.

He does discuss setting fan curves in Afterburner briefly here: https://youtu.be/cqshaJTI8FQ?t=745
My curves look like his.