Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 470 4GB Overclocking with Wattman
Silent BIOS defaults are 1206 MHz core clock and 1162 mV. Overclocked BIOS was 1260 MHz, if I recall correctly. I used the Unigine Heaven benchmark in Windowed mode for all my tests, with Tesselation set to medium and 4xAA. I kept GPU-Z running to monitor stats.
Global Settings
- I turned off Surface Format Optimization because Voodoo.
- I enabled VSync, because I can't stand tearing (disabled for benchmarking)
- I set Tesselation Mode to override and max tesselation level to 16x, as I heard anything more is overkill and unnecessary for AMD cards.
- I set Frame Rate Target Control to 63 (disabled for benchmarking), because a) my monitor can only do 60 FPS anyway (VSync) and b) setting it to 60 still produced tearing. Will help keep noise levels down and save power.
- For the rest I kept the defaults.
- Haven't tested the Power Efficiency setting yet. It's supposed to noticeably reduce power usage when watching Youtube videos etc.
Wattman Settings
I let the benchmark run for a while until the temperature didn't rise anymore then made a benchmark with default settings. Then I adjusted knobs until I was satisfied.
Temperature to manual; target 75, max 85 °C (default 90). Power Limit to 50% (default 0) so the GPU doesn't have to throttle down at all.
Fan Speed to manual, min 800, max 1600 (max noise level I was able to tolerate -- it's audible in my case, but acceptable).
I undervolted in 25 mV steps. The default at 1162 mV reached ~76°C, 1550 RPM, ~137 W average for 81.3 FPS. I could undervolt by 75 mV to 1087 mV without problems. At 1062 I got instability issues, like Programs crashing upon start etc. Incidentally, 0.75 V undervolting is what I read was pretty standard for the Radeon, so I'm happy with that. At 1087 mV the framerate didn't change, of course, but power consumption went down to ~102 W, temp went down to 72° (3° below target) and fan speed to 1300 RPM, which was fairly quiet.
I then tried overclocking a bit to at least get in range of the target temperature. I got to 1280 MHz without artifacts in the benchmark, but decided to drop down to 1260, which incidentally is the setting used in the OC BIOS of the card. The frame rate increased from 81.3 to 84.9, power consumption to 104 W average. Fan speed stays at ~1300 RPM (between 27% and 30%) and the temperature at ~72°C.
I didn't touch the memory clock as I heard it wasn't worth it.
So now I think I've got pretty sane settings. Smooth sailing all around.
edit: Someone got the core voltage down by 137 mV on the same card. Gotta try lowering it again just to make sure.