Question Hitting Voltage and Power Limits under load after a mild OC

[Araborum]

So i am facing a bit of a conundrum. I am running KFA2 1080 ExOc and i decided to tinker with some overclocking, having done a half decent job on my older MSI 970. For context, i have EVGA G3 550W PSU, and Ryzen 2700X that i got dirt cheap. Hooray for impatient sellers!

As i was running Time Spy benchmark yesterday, i noticed that despite the initial gains, the scores suddenly fell when i reached +70 on core and +100 on memory. The temperature is fine, reaching 78 C, but, according to MSI Afterburner, power and voltage ceiling is being reached simultaneously with when the card is being maxed out by the benchmark. This is around when it turboes up to around 1960-1970 Mhz on core. With this in mind, is it possible that its not that i lost the silicon lottery but rather reached the max output of my PSU?

This is also somewhat supported once i punch in my configuration AND the increased frequencies (in turbo mode, of course) into a PSU calculator, which puts me at the very edge of what the PSU can put out. Granted, when i bough the PSU i bought it for the Intel platform I had with a 4770 and MSI 970...

Has anyone faced such a problem before? is this card that limited or do i need to pony up and get minimum 650 PSU for Christmas? I would love to have that excuse...

 

[kerberos_20]

hi, voltage and power has nothing to do with PSU, for sure your psu might be weak when doing OC, but that power limit here lies in you GPU PCB design
it has 1x6pin and 1x 8pin pci-e plugs
75watts from pci-e x16 slot
75watts from 1x6pin
150watts from 1x8 pin
which would be 300watts
those are max numbers and usualy it wont go up to its rated thermals/amperage, its software limited (in gpu bios)

as far as i can tell u can push it to 250watts with msi afterburner once u move power limit slider
if u want 300watts, u will need replace gpu bios (can brick your gpu)

 

[Araborum]

I am rather 'green' when it comes to all things voltage, but is it no strange that voltage limit was reached before, say thermal limit?

 

[kerberos_20]

voltage limit is when your gpu still has some overclocking headroom (power limit not reached), but it cant overclock any higher as it hit voltage limits, it can be raised to 1.2volts (on decent boards)
but raising voltage will increase wattage, so performance may degrade if ure already close to power wall

 

[Araborum]

And given that i am running a 550W PSU i don't really have much headroom to play with here...so overclocking is on hold until later. Thanks for the response and some insight into voltage, kerberos!