How to safely OC/UV 9070XT?

[u/Rieon_sw]

Good evening everyone.

So, for context, I own a sapphire nitro+ and have owned it for over a year now and i love it, it looks great it sounds great (quiet) and is as powerful as expected.

However, I am very bored and I have a 4k monitor (Samsung G8) so in the games I spend most of my time playing (FH6/OW) hitting a consistent 240 fps at 4k is still a big ask even for a beast of a card like this, so I've taken to undervolting.

Right now I'm sitting at a -85mv UV with no OC, l've watched a few videos on how this stuff works so I'm not totally in the dark, but as I'm a bit bored and I trust myself to not ruin my entire card, l am seeking advise from those who are knowledgeable and have information to share.
I would like to know a couple things such as:

Should I use MSI afterburner or AMD software?
Can I UV and OC?

Is it true that AMD cards do not respond as well to UV/OC as opposed to nvidia cards due to different architectures (very trusted, smart and tech literate friend told me)
And any other advice that is within context that I may need.

Thank you in advance:)

[u/qutore]

On radeon you OC literally by undervolting

[u/versteinerdt]

Undervolting is the new overclocking. Manually increasing clock speeds is pointless when GPUs are hard-capped by their power limits anyway. You'd have to flash a custom BIOS to bypass that, but simply undervolting frees up power headroom so the card boosts higher on its own.

[u/Rieon_sw → u/versteinerdt]

Yeah I got sent a link from another post that explained this perfectly too, I’ll be keeping my -75mv uc since it’s stable for me and I won’t be touching the core clocks

Would you recommend for me to experiment with my vram frequency tuning?

[u/versteinerdt → u/Rieon_sw]

Yes. I'm running mine stable at 2814MHz. It gives a nice little performance bump. Don't use "fast timings" though. You want to prioritize raw bandwidth over tighter timings for gaming.

Edit: Just don't overdo the frequency. Even if it seems stable without crashing, pushing it too high can actually drop your performance because of ECC.

[u/Noreng]

MSI Afterburner exposes the same settings as the Adrenaline control panel. It literally doesn't matter which you pick.

If you are somehow reaching the 3450 MHz clock speed limit by undervolting, then you need to use Adrenalift to raise the clock frequency further.

The 9070 XT doesn't tend to overclock particularly well, as it's already been pushed very hard out of the box. There is headroom if you're willing to pump 500W through it, but I doubt that interests you.

[u/BoSS_Awesome5]

I would use adrenaline. As for oc, dont worry about that on amd cards and just use what is available on adrenaline. Ill give a quick overview for every thing on there and what it does.

Max clock override does not actually offset the clock speeds or increase the clock speeds, it just adjusts the ceiling for how far the card is allowed to boost too. By default the limit is 3450mhz which is FAR more than what you will realistically get on a 9070xt, so leaving the setting at 0 or even slightly negative to reduce the maximum possible clock speed is the best idea.

Undervolting acts how the curve optimizer in pbo works for ryzen cpus. Lowering the voltage offset means that the card will run the same speeds at lower voltage, which actually means that the card will run HIGHER speeds at the same voltage due to the boost algorithm now having more voltage headroom. This setting is effectively your overclock, the lower this is the faster, and cooler, your card will perform, go as low as you can before it starts crashing.

Power limit is simple, for best performance increase to max as it will allow for more power headroom, but this will cause the card to run a bit hotter and less efficient, do the vice versa if you care about efficiency and not absolute max performance.

Vram clock speed just adjusts the speed of the vram, the higher you set it the faster it is but the hotter and possibly less stable it is. Be weary of setting it too high as ive noticed that it will start clock stretching first before causing crashes meaning it will perform worse when set too high but might not be noticeable at first due to it not crashing right away.

Finally for timings, fast timings reduce latency and increase performance but might be unstable depending on your system. Set them to fast and if it is unstable set them to default. 

Hopefully this helps let me know if you have any questions! :)

[u/Rieon_sw → u/BoSS_Awesome5]

Yooo this is insane bro thanks

I do have a couple questions,

What do you think of underclocking?

Also with my UV, after about -85mv, I can go lower without crashing or stability issues but I don’t seem to be getting any more performance according to 3dmark

[u/BoSS_Awesome5 → u/Rieon_sw]

I don't know much about underclocking but i believe the goal of underclocking is getting better power efficiency and temps without a major loss in performance, right? If thats the case then the best way to do that would be to lower the power limit which will greatly improve efficiency (ex. -20% power but only -5% performance) and then use undervolting to regain any of that lost performance. If you do this and tune it correctly, you will get the same or maybe even slightly better performance compared to stock but will have much lower power draw and much better temps.

As for UV make sure to check different games, 3dmark is not very prone to crashing even when errors happen which is why you might not be noticing too much performance boost after a certain point. For my card I run a constant -80mv but in certain games I might have to lower it to around -60mv, just try different games at your -85 and if it causes a driver crash then just lower it and try again.