What you can do instead of increasing power limit, is to switch to manual voltage settings. The "auto" voltage adjustments that the GPU comes with typically miss high by about 50mV at any given frequency. That may not sound like much, but the wattage savings are significant from lowering the voltage even this small amount.
I prefer to use AMD's WattMan utility which is already running inside their driver software anyway (no use in adding a 3rd party background program like Afterburner). You'll go to AMD Settings - Global Settings - Global WattMan (tab). In there, below the graph is the important stuff. There's a toggle next to "Frequency" and "Voltage", set them to "Dynamic" and "Manual" respectively and you're off to the races.
What you want to do is test out a stable voltage for the State 7 frequency (the highest one). Then set States 6 and 7 equal to State 5 and dial in a voltage for that frequency, so on and so forth. Doing this, you can begin to generate a graph (ie Excel) of your freq/voltage curve so you can interpolate the other states, which saves you time of testing every single state. GloFo's 14nm process inflects at around 950mV. So expect any states above that point to have a steeper voltage curve than states below it.
If you give me the frequency of each state, I can ballpark you a voltage.
Your VRAM voltage (scroll down a bit) sets the lowest the core voltage will go (except for idle state). Minimum VRAM voltage is a little harder to test for, basically you need to give the core "plenty" of voltage so you take it out of the stability equation and then lower the VRAM voltage until you reach instability. I haven't done extensive testing to find absolute minimum, but I run 2000MHz/~900mV for the VRAM. Therefore, any performance states that I've set a core voltage <900mV will just get 900mV anyway. Regardless of manual core voltage settings.
Power Limit increases shouldn't be necessary when you're setting manual voltage, so you can leave that at 0%. Basically all that setting is doing is letting the GPU auto-overvolt itself. When you go to manual voltages, that ability gets taken away so the card will either run stably (with sufficient manual voltage setting) or it will crash (insufficient manual voltage setting)
When you've got a profile you like, you can click "Save Profile" in the top right corner. I've got 3 different profiles saved (OC, undervolt @ stock, and underclocked+undervolted). It's easy to load them. Also, once you've got profiles saved, you can go to to a game-specific profile (AMD Settings - Gaming Homepage - Click desired game icon - Profile WattMan tab) and set a freq/voltage profile that only applies to that specific game.
**PSA - My rig has issues applying my Global WattMan profiles on cold boot (Profile WattMan settings generally apply ok). To fix this, I simply restart my PC, then go in an load my saved profile. Not sure why, but this has been "broken" on my machine for over a year. Not all PCs have this problem though. I guess AMD dislikes me.
For the longest time, I used FurMark to test GPU stability. However, a couple years ago, I discovered that
F@H (of all things) is actually better/faster at determining GPU stability. I can set voltages that are stable in FurMark, but crash in F@H in less than an hour. F@H is actually faster at detecting faulty system RAM than Memtest/Prime95 also.
Some other things to compound benefits (I can explain these more if you want me to)
If you have a FreeSync monitor, enable "Chill"
If you don't have a FreeSync monitor, enable "Frame Rate Target Control"
I've played around with the "Power Efficiency" toggle, and while it didn't adversely affect frame rate consistency much, but it seems to only be enabled when you're in "auto" voltage mode.
If you DON'T enable Chill/FRTC, your GPU will mostly either run at State 7 or idle. You may get some sporadic bounces into the lower states, but it shouldn't be frequent/prolonged.
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