Question Underclocking/Undervolting a 4080 Super for an Intel i7-7700k CPU ?

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Fatal_Pastry

May 30, 2024
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Hello,

Currently I'm slowly upgrading pc parts as they fail and/or I can afford it, and as a result right now I have the kind of weird combination of an Intel i7 7700k CPU with a 4080 super as my GPU. I am experiencing lag spikes in games after this upgrade and after investigation I believe it may be due to my CPU being unable to keep up with the GPU's performance and that leading to throttling on my system. It was suggested to me that I underclock or undervolt the GPU to compensate. I'm ok with losing some performance for now if it results in a more stable system. However I haven't done much underclocking before, mostly overclocking, and I'm also not sure how much to reduce it by.

Does anyone have any experience with underclocking or undervolting a 4080 super for a 1151 socket CPU? How much should I be looking to reduce it by? Any advice or discussions you could point me to would be welcomed.
 
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One of the thumb rules with overclocking is practically the same as underclocking, which is you gradually work your way until you hit a wall of sorts(instability). In the case of underclocking you go down instead of up. This is one such reddit you can find off the www. IMHO, I'd leave things as is, only when you've moved onto something that's concurrent platform wise that can take advantage of your RTX4080 Super is when you try and dial in the settings.
 
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Lutfij said:
One of the thumb rules with overclocking is practically the same as underclocking, which is you gradually work your way until you hit a wall of sorts(instability). In the case of underclocking you go down instead of up. This is one such reddit you can find off the www. IMHO, I'd leave things as is, only when you've moved onto something that's concurrent platform wise that can take advantage of your RTX4080 Super is when you try and dial in the settings.
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I can't leave things as is, as I'm getting massive instability right now. Games, any game, regularly drop to 5-10FPS for several seconds before bouncing back and recovering. I've been trying to fix this for a couple of weeks and am now at the point where I'm wondering if it's hardware not playing nice. That's why I'm underclocking, otherwise I'd leave this at stock.
 
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It doesn't make sense that a GPU can perform "faster" than the CPU when the CPU is the one feeding it work. And if the CPU isn't feeding it work, the GPU can't demand more work. It'll just idle. Now it might be that all other things equal, the interaction between the CPU and drivers (since it has to work with a newer GPU) might be different enough to cause this impact, but I don't see a practical way to verify this.

In any case, if you want to limit the performance of the video card, it's much easier to set a driver wide frame rate limiter or power limit the card rather than undervolting.

Undervolting is something you do if you want the most efficient performance out of it.
 
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Really depends on what you are trying to run. 4080 Super is 1440p/240hz or4K 120hz territory. If you are still running 1080p and expecting huge frame rates, it may be your CPU that is the problem trying to push out that many frames.

Is the 7700k overclocked, the memory? What are temperatures like? Power supply?

Still, I would turn on V-Sync or G-Sync and see if that takes care of things for now. Reduce any CPU/Memory overclocks just to see if things improve.

I wouldn't think underclocking/lowering the power limit of the GPU would do much.
 
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Games, any game, regularly drop to 5-10FPS for several seconds before bouncing back and recovering. I've been trying to fix this for a couple of weeks and am now at the point where I'm wondering if it's hardware not playing nice.
By any chance did this happen after you got the RTX4080? What GPU were you on prior? Make and model of your PSU and it's age?
 
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Lutfij said:
Games, any game, regularly drop to 5-10FPS for several seconds before bouncing back and recovering. I've been trying to fix this for a couple of weeks and am now at the point where I'm wondering if it's hardware not playing nice.
By any chance did this happen after you got the RTX4080? What GPU were you on prior? Make and model of your PSU and it's age?
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It began happening immediately after getting the 4080 super yeah. Previously I was on a 2080ti made by EVGA. Unfortunately the GPU wound up dying on me and I had to replace it, and figured I'd get one that sort of future-proofed me (also the 3000 series was $3000 at all the stores near me for some absurd reason). The PSU is a brand-new 1200w thermaltake toughpower gf a3. I also had this issue with my old corsair 850 watt PSU.
 
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Eximo said:
Really depends on what you are trying to run. 4080 Super is 1440p/240hz or4K 120hz territory. If you are still running 1080p and expecting huge frame rates, it may be your CPU that is the problem trying to push out that many frames.

Is the 7700k overclocked, the memory? What are temperatures like? Power supply?

Still, I would turn on V-Sync or G-Sync and see if that takes care of things for now. Reduce any CPU/Memory overclocks just to see if things improve.

I wouldn't think underclocking/lowering the power limit of the GPU would do much.
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My monitor is 2560 × 1440 and 165hz, and I run all games at that or with a limit of 120 FPS. I'm not expecting above that, I just want the games that used to run well to not stutter.

My CPU is completely stock, PSU is a brand-new 1200w thermaltake toughpower gf a3 but I had the same issue with my old Corsair 850 watt. I haven't been monitoring the CPU temps while playing, admittedly, and was looking at the GPU instead, but I can check it.

Turning off V- and G-Sync was actually one of the first things I tried when this issue began so I was getting it when I had them on as well. Regarding the underclocking suggestion, I was just following the vague advice of some guy at the computer store, as I am a bit of a novice with PC hardware beyond building them and doing the odd maintenance.
 
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@Fatal_Pastry, I have an undervolted 4080 Super and an i5-13600KF. When I experimented with undervolting the CPU, something similar to you happened to me, it was caused by a high ring offset, the CPU "couldn't feed" the GPU. Try to limit the fps in the NVIDIA Control panel so that the CPU "keeps up".
 
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rene641 said:
@Fatal_Pastry, I have an undervolted 4080 Super and an i5-13600KF. When I experimented with undervolting the CPU, something similar to you happened to me, it was caused by a high ring offset, the CPU "couldn't feed" the GPU. Try to limit the fps in the NVIDIA Control panel so that the CPU "keeps up".
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That does sound similar to what's happening to me, yeah. I've noticed some possible improvement with massively UCing my GPU, I'll try setting a framerate limit and seeing if that helps.
 
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rene641 said:
@Fatal_Pastry, I have an undervolted 4080 Super and an i5-13600KF. When I experimented with undervolting the CPU, something similar to you happened to me, it was caused by a high ring offset, the CPU "couldn't feed" the GPU. Try to limit the fps in the NVIDIA Control panel so that the CPU "keeps up".
Click to expand...
Unfortunately even with a frame limit of 60 I still see dips into the 20s while playing games that aren't very intensive, like turn-based rpgs, dota, etc.
 
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rene641 said:
Um, something is wrong here. Did you install new NVIDIA drivers? If you look in GPU-Z, does the card work as it should? What motherboard do you have?
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I've reinstalled the latest drivers using DDU twice and through the geforce experience once. I have an ASUS z270-A motherboard. I have not checked the GPU with GPU-Z, though I've used other software to attempt to diagnose issues with mixed success. I am aware the motherboard is pretty old and only has pcie 3.0 slots, but I didn't think that would cause this specific issue. I am stuck with this card so kind of need to make it work.
 
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rene641 said:
Verify by any means that the GPU runs in 3.0 X16. Check if your memory is in XMP mode.
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From what I can tell the 4080 super should work in a 3.0 x16 slot. No one has posted elsewhere that they are incompatible from my searching, nor have any of the people I've asked advised as much. My memory is probably not in XMP mode as I never enabled it or had heard of it before.
 
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The RTX 4080 Super is compatible with PCIE 3.0, but when diagnosing and looking for a problem, you need to verify that it really runs on PCIE 3.0 16x. GPU-Z is the fastest and easiest way to do this. What if your GPU has a manufacturing defect?
Find out if yourmemory modules supports xmp and if so enable it.
 
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rene641 said:
The RTX 4080 Super is compatible with PCIE 3.0, but when diagnosing and looking for a problem, you need to verify that it really runs on PCIE 3.0 16x. GPU-Z is the fastest and easiest way to do this. What if your GPU has a manufacturing defect?
Find out if yourmemory modules supports xmp and if so enable it.
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It is possible it has a defect, of course, I just wanted to try to eliminate more obvious things before returning it. What should I be looking for in GPU-Z? I will install it and run it while playing games.
 
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GPU-Z, check "Bus Inerface" and let me know.
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Do you have the latest BIOS on your motherboard?
 
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I'm not sure if xmp is worth buying new RAM. Unfortunately, your chipset has one more limitation, it does not support the so-called resizable bar. What exactly is the type of your RAM? Did you upload the latest bios?
 
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it seems to me that you should have upgraded to a faster CPU, before buying such a high end graphics card. Your 7700K is holding that card back from reaching it's highest potential. I'm using a 2060 Super with a i7-6700, in one of my machines, and even that bottlenecks sometimes, depending on the resolution. The only reason that I even bought the card was to make RT, and DLSS available, and I didn't want a card with less than 8gb of VRAM, since that was what my GTX 1080 had. The 2060 Super or 2070 non-Super were the only realistic choices. Anything more powerful would have been useless with that CPU.
 
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Joseph_138 said:
it seems to me that you should have upgraded to a faster CPU, before buying such a high end graphics card. Your 7700K is holding that card back from reaching it's highest potential. I'm using a 2060 Super with a i7-6700, in one of my machines, and even that bottlenecks sometimes, depending on the resolution. The only reason that I even bought the card was to make RT, and DLSS available, and I didn't want a card with less than 8gb of VRAM, since that was what my GTX 1080 had. The 2060 Super or 2070 non-Super were the only realistic choices. Anything more powerful would have been useless with that CPU.
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I upgraded initially only because my existing GPU failed. I was perfectly happy with my 2080ti and would've just kept using it indefinitely. Admittedly I didn't spend a ton of time doing research as I just needed something and figured I'd get something that would future proof me. I knew it would be bottlenecked, but I didn't expect the bottleneck to result in significant frame drops for long periods. I thought it would just limit the max output of the card, which I was fine with.
 
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rene641 said:
I'm not sure if xmp is worth buying new RAM. Unfortunately, your chipset has one more limitation, it does not support the so-called resizable bar. What exactly is the type of your RAM? Did you upload the latest bios?
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The RAM I have right now is G.Skill TridendZ DDR4, model code is F4-3600C14D-32GTZRA. How likely do you think the lack of XMP mode is to blame for my issues? If it fixes my problem it's worth new RAM imo. I haven't flashed the BIOS yes. The only available update is from 2017 and I thought it was less likely to be the cause of the problem. I also wasn't sure how to update the BIOS for an asus mobo so I figured I'd do the other two things first.
 
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