wolfy87

I have periods of time when I`m really busy on my work, and don`t have time for games and all..Only thing I do is office and maybe net browsing..

But I have a strong video card for the periods of gaming , so can I lower it`s clocks in Riva or AtiT, so thet it heats less, produce less noise, and dissipate less heat overall in my case?

Can I damage my card with this, and if I can`t, to which values can I reduce GPU and mem clocks?

P.S. I know that this is maybe the first time to hear about someone wants to slow down it`s graphic card insted of bulking it, but please try to be helpful..

Puscifer

I'm pretty sure you could underclock it if ya wanyed. I can't see any reason why it would damage it at all. If you can boost a cards clocks without any harm I don't see how slowing it down a bit would hurt it. I don't know how low you should go though. Really it shouldn't take too much underclocking to get the heat to drop enough that you could drop the fan speed for reduced noise and still have cooler case temps. If ya wanted though I'm sure you could lower it quite a bit and still have enough power to do everything ya need besides gaming and 3d apps.

prosser13

All cards come with 2D and 3D clocks anyway, so it's automatically underclocking the card when your not using it

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Blameless

Yes, you can underclock with most overclocking utilities.

Yes, underclocking will cause the card to use somewhat less power and make less heat.

No, you will not damage the card by doing so.

Clocking too low may produce a crash as there is a minimum multiplier (most video cards have a 27MHz reference clock) attached to most of the clocks. However, no real harm will be done if this happens, just reboot. The best values will depend on your card.

Many cards have separate 2D and 3D clocks, but this is not the majority of them. NVIDIA cards from the FX line to the 7900s have 2D/3D clocks. I don't recall if my G80 did, but I know that the G92s do not have separate 2D and 3D clocks.

I'm not sure if current gen ATI cards have separate clocks, but I know that my X800 and older cards did not.

wolfy87

so just create some profiles, 2d, normal, 3d,
for just 2d, 2d + some movies or little gaming, and 3d maybe slight OC for just gaming?
right?
For example most OCed 8600gt, I can go from 540--> 250Mhz for GPUCore, and some 700-->450Mhz for memory(1400-->900Mhz double data rate DDR3) right?

ZealotKi11er

If you are doing office owrk then the VC will not be in use so it will be in 2D mode. Usually VC produce Hal when i use playing games. Downcloking my lower temps like 5-8C. Thats what i did for my card going form 560 stock to 300.

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Perry

Everybody is correct.

Chances are your card has a 2D, 3D and 3D Performance mode so as long as a 3D application isn't picked up by your card then it'll be running in 2D mode with a reduced power consumption unless you used RivaTuner or another application to run it higher than is needed.

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wolfy87

but still I see some temps about 40 degrees at idle...
Sure i can`t damage it by underclocking?
What`s the worst scenario?

dragosmp

Worse case scenario: it locks as soon as you underclock it, it's also a very likely scenario. To really reduce the 2D power consumption that is already very small you have to do a heck of an underclock. The 8600GT already underclocks the GPU in 2D mode (don't remember how much, but you can chack the 2D reduced 3D and 3D profiles with NiBiTor).

You can't damage it, reset and all is back, just make sure you don't make rivatuner or what you use to "enable clocks on boot-up" before you're not sure that they are reliable.

Thirdly I doubt you can gain much, but you can gain somewhere. A 8600GT is a very cool card, but the fan picks up 4-6W regardless of it's rpm. Get a Accelero S2 that cools passive the card and you gain a couple of W easily, not to mention that while working in a non-3D environment, the silence is golden.

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Perry

40 degrees at idle is pretty good.

In 2D mode with standard clocks my GTS idles around 45 and that's with the automatic settings taking effect. I'm not too sure why you would need it to run any cooler since cards can usually handle up to 100 degrees.

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