Question RTX 3060 - - - reducing voltage/frequency as power/load increases beyond approx 60% ?

[Brandymanhattan]

Hello all!

I'm trying to get some temp/power/performance benefit out of an MSI GF65 Thin Laptop with an RTX 3060 and an i7-10750H CPU. Running stock settings for baseline in OCCT stress test (GPU Adaptive) and seeing this in HWiNFO64:

1. GPU Frequency/volts increasing until max reached about the 50% load point, where it is maxing out voltage (0.9) and Frequency (1785 MHz). Here, power is approx. 67 W

2. As the test increases GPU load from this pint, power maxes out at 73W. For the remainder of the test, each successive load step produces a reduced GPU voltage, with the Frequency reduction

3. Once full load is reached, the Frequency is down to 1370 MHz

4. According to HWiNFO64, the only limiting factor is power, with no other GPU Performance limiters tripping. No thermal limit reached (max of 75deg on what is reported to be an 87deg limit).

Anyone have an idea of why the voltage is being cut back? I can't find any current draw parameters in HWiNFO. MSI Afterburner was used to verify that the voltage vs. freq curve is being adhered to.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Aeacus]

Based on the developer of OCCT, in 3D Adaptive test - Variable, when GPU reaches the peak frequency, it sees the load to be too high for it and GPU reduces frequency according to that.

Video explaining OCCT 3D Adaptive tests:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze0UM8EZ08c


To cross-validate if the OCCT has some custom methodology that makes GPU act like so during testing or is the GPU really acting this way, better to bench the GPU with 2nd benchmark program. E.g Unigine Superposition,
link: https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition

There, you can monitor GPU frequency in real time, according to the load and temps, among other things.

 

[Brandymanhattan]

Thank you so much. I'll give those a try and start my tuning from there. Thanks!