Undervolting AMD's Radeon R9 Fury For Better Efficiency

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Can we get rid of these garbage graphs?!

Please just show bar graphs or more normalized line graphs that compare multiple cards' power usage. I don't need to see the raw data guys.
 
That's pretty awsome! I've always wondered how well an undervolted R9 would do. 200W (almost) is pretty amazing for that specific card.

I hope GPU vendors start getting smart (no pun intended) by making specfic models that automatically come with an undervolted GPU, but these GPUs would cost more since the vendors would have to take their best GPUs from production, test them, and then undervolt them. Similar to how EVGA picks out their GPUs with higher ASIC quality...but in this situation, it would be for power efficiency, not overclocking.
 
It appears that AMD doesn't spend nearly as much time on their testing to dial in a perfect voltage like NVIDIA does. Which I'm not to surprised about considering the money NVIDA has in comparison to AMD. Great find!
 


nVidia can afford to lose a few chips by binning. AMD cannot, they need to be able to sell all of the chips they can.

That said, nVidia probably does spend more time optimizing their uArch since all they handle is GPUs.

Interesting to see but it tells me that AMDs Radeon group needs to start kicking it up a notch to become more competitive. Power isn't the end all but it is pretty big when you have to consider the amount of extra heat your case now has to clear out.
 
CORRECTION:

The graph labeled "Gaming - Performance - UHD" may have incorrectly labeled the the graphics cards as "Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Nitro" and "Sapphire's Radeon R9 Fury Nitro -48 mV." These are both AMD cards.

But the paragraph under that graph mentions that "Sapphire's Radeon R9 Fury Nitro does edge out Nvidia's offering," as if the graph meant to compare an AMD and an Nvidia card - not two AMD cards.

I think the label is wrong on the graph because the bars in the graph are red and green, suggesting an AMD-Nvidia comparison.
 
Pretty cool article, its really impresive to see that card shaving almost 80W in consumption, but the fan curve didn't help much with the temps, why don you set the fan at a constant speed while doing the tests? That way will give you a better undestanding of how much the temp can decrease.
 
The fan is controlled by the arbitrator and it was important to show, how this Power Tune construction works. The temps are in both cases ok, but the goal was a quieter, not a cooler card. Nobody will decrease the temps if they are acceptable, but the fan noise is killing the customers (and me) 😉

@Eggz:
This is a translation and the original text was a little bit different. Ok, It might be better to use other colors, you are right, but it was understandable here.

BTW:
Something was going wrong with this CMS system. I get another (empty) thread for this review:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2965949/undervolting-amd-radeon-fury-efficiency.html



I've tried also a MSI R9 390X Gaming 8GB. I got -100mV and 48 Watts less. The cheaper R9 380X can't be undervolted, because the VR chips are not adjustable. The voltage is mostly pin-coded and you need the specs to make a hard mod.
 
I did this with my R9 Nano, and set a fan curve in afterburner to where the fan spins 100% speed at 80c and 50% at 60c, and 20% at 20c.

i undervolted the card and with the fan spinning a bit higher, i was able to get a 15c lower temp and get higher score in 3dmark because of no throttling.
 


Thanks for replying. Was it meant to be an AMD-AMD comparison or an AMD-Nvidia comparison?
 
This is an amazing and very interesting review. I love it and I hope more like this come in the future. However i missed the point where it "sais" :

".......The fact that AMD tends to set extremely high voltage targets for its graphics cards' GPUs can almost be considered standard at this point. Its strategy does maximize the number of GPUs that can be used, especially at the beginning of its production cycle, thereby increasing yield......"

Can someone elaborate please? Thank you in advance.
 


Someone else please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the quoted language means to get at this: When a high voltage is applied to all cards, more cards will break, and people will need to buy new cards. If not, I think the major point is that (based on whatever motivation), AMD will sell more cards if it sets voltages high. The part about "especially at the beginning of its production cycle" could be a reference to the fact that AMD didn't originally allow voltages to be adjusted. From then until now, people who bought early faced a higher chance of their card dying from the voltage being too high. . . . This is based on interpretation and background knowledge, so it's just my best attempt to unpack the language you quoted. I'm open to other possible interpretations if there are any.
 
This is an amazing and very interesting review. I love it and I hope more like this come in the future. However i missed the point where it "sais" :

".......The fact that AMD tends to set extremely high voltage targets for its graphics cards' GPUs can almost be considered standard at this point. Its strategy does maximize the number of GPUs that can be used, especially at the beginning of its production cycle, thereby increasing yield......"

Can someone elaborate please? Thank you in advance.
Click to expand...

The minimum amount of voltage a chip needs to remain stable at a given speed varies from chip to chip due to tiny variations within the manufacturing process. A high target increases the amount of imperfections that a chip can have and still be stable (and thus can be sold) at the reference speed and voltage, at the cost of higher power draw and heat for the whole line.
 
I undervolted my XFX R9 390 a few days ago currently it's at -100mV 1050/1600mhz and has not crashed/shown artifacts in 3 days. I've been playing mostly Witcher 3 and CS:GO both on max settings at 2560x1080p, and the temps are amazing they dropped from high 70s to mid-low 60s which is perfect as far as i'm concerned. I had the card at 1100/1700 before and i've not noticed an fps drop in realtime gaming and the tiny coil whine my card had completely disappeared! Definitely recommend undervolting on the R9 series.
 
@Math Geek
"what other cards can take advantage of this? you state some others can but don't share which ones :)

just wondering if any of the cards i have could benefit from this."

I have a MSI R9 380 4GD5T OC and undervolted by 50 mV, and it's stable at stock clocks (980/1375 core/memory). Using default fan curve, I think fans stayed about 5-10% lower than at stock voltage when running Unigine Valley. Alternatively, I tried locking the fans at 50% (point at which they become quite noticeable for me), and temps dropped 5 C.
 
I have a Fury Tri-X partially unlocked (3584->3840 shaders). I found 1066/550 to be stable overclock without overvolting (experieced instability at 1072 or 560, so I dialed it back a bit since I don't want to toe the line). Gonna try -48mv for a while, after a 50 minute Rise of the Tomb Raider test it has been stable, so now to see if it keeps long term.
 


The charts label is wrong, it is already corrected in German version. Sorry for that, the review was written within two days 😉
03-Gaming-Performance.png
 
No after reading all of this I'm starting to wonder why AMD didn't do it in the first place? Most of the current accusations towards them was "hot power hog", and now you are showing that getting close 980 in terms of performance per Watt... how the hell did they missed it? Now ok you are not holding the reference card... that might not work that well and that might be explanation, but in that case why Sapphire also missed that fact?
 
It is too (time-) expensive to check each GPU for the max. voltage (binning) manually.

Nvidia is using the ASIC quality values to handle the voltage in their Boost feature more flexible. This is the reason why it makes no sense to undervolt a Nvidia GPU. AMD is using the same worst case voltage for all chips, to sell more working GPUs. :)
 
How about doing the same but with the Nano? Lowest stable voltage and lowest voltage/frequency while keeping 70-90% of it's performance.

Could the Nano achieve 100w consumption?
 
The firmware of the Nano is different and the GPUs were already binned. I tried this with the Nano too and got'nt sensational results. You can save a little bit power and the card works a little bit colder. And it depends at the GPU bingo.
 
Well I believe you are right it's too expensive to check all those chips.
I guess it's the same as with OC, more mature the tech (higher yields from the wafer) the more headroom, but still they don't bother to check it properly so instead they artificially limit performance (like ratio with CPU's, etc) despite the chip quality could be nearly the same across the whole line.

Anyways that's a good news meaning AMD is closing the gap to nVidia and possibly next iteration (Polaris) will live up to it's "chilly" name :)
 
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