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Frostyeel
Joined: 25 Nov 2006
Posts: 1073
Location: California
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 Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 11:15 pm Post subject: The benefits of underclocking your videocard (on XP) |
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I got a Kill A Watt because they're only $20 on Amazon, and I've been playing around with it recently. One of the most interesting things that I have found so far is that underclocking my video card significantly decreases power consumption when the card is idling. I have a 4870, which is a pretty power hungry card, and for a while I've been using two profiles in Catalyst Control Center. "Idle" sets the clocks at 500MHz GPU and 450MHz memory (the minimum clocks), and "Gaming" sets the clocks at 750MHz GPU and 900MHz memory.
When my computer is idle it uses 125W with the Idle profile and 150W with the Gaming profile. So when I'm just using my browser and listening to music I can use 25W less just by clicking on the taskbar icon and then clicking on the profile I want (you can also set up a hotkey but I'm too lazy to do that). That's pretty big savings for basically zero effort. I'm sure Nvidia's equivalent software is also capable of doing the same thing. It's not a lot of electricity but depending on how much your computer is turned on and running it could save you several dollars.
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Last edited by Frostyeel on Fri Jul 30, 2010 4:55 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mikefury
Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 883
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| Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 2:33 am Post subject: |
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Your drivers, ati or nvidia, is suppose to do that automatically. If you're using XP or an older version of Vista, it won't. I know my 4870x2 does it and it does it well. I'm using Win 7 64bit.
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Frostyeel
Joined: 25 Nov 2006
Posts: 1073
Location: California
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| Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 4:55 am Post subject: |
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Oh, cool. I'm still on XP, so I guess this only applies to XP users.
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Mikefury
Joined: 01 May 2009
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 1:28 am Post subject: |
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As an ATI user with Win XP, you're suppose to have one awesome benefit which I'm not too sure if it still exists. The benefit is that you can still do spanning in a dual monitor setup. This is actually not an ATI issue but rather in a Microsoft one. Microsoft, being the cool kids that they are, decided that DX10+ users will not have the ability to span their graphics. This is why Nvidia's Surround View and Ati's Eyefinity (aside from the 6+ monitor support) is a big deal nowadays.
I sadly found this out when I put my dual monitor setup together when I got Win 7. :-\
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