Yes, I finally have it in my hands, the long-awaited AMD Radeon VII. Yeah, it has 16 GB of HBM2 video memory and 3840 stream processor, so on and so forth, but since it’s been a while after the initial release date of it and since everyone else has benchmarked it above and beyond and did they Radeon VII review, you can see mine results rolling on your screen right as we speak so feel free take a look at them if you’re still interested up until now, maybe you are since I use ultra-wide resolution in my testing, but other than that I’ve decided not to go too deep into technicalities in this video, as all of that has been covered multiple times, but rather make this video more around the fact what can be done with this card in terms of undervolting it and overall performance correlation when you start to play around in this area. So… Let’s go on and do just that!
The Radeon VII itself is a performance beast, there’s no doubt about that, especially for its price, but much as the Vega 64 and Vega 56, it’s what you would say a rare find among users, especially compared to the RX 580 series. Also, just as the aforementioned duo, it benefits greatly when you fiddle with its voltage curve, power and clock settings. One rather interesting topic and concern came along with this card, and that’s what it can get pretty loud, hot and power hungry, so I went in to check out what’s that all about in person and see what can be done about it and make a Radeon VII undervolt guide out of it for you.
The loud and hot part is basically a chain reaction, and although at first 70-75°C of GPU temperature under load at default settings doesn’t seem that much, when you count in the fact that that’s with a pretty beefy cooler underneath this outer shell, paired with three 75 mm fans running at around 2600 RPM, and the edge temperature also being the least hot part of the GPU, you could say that it’s somewhat challenging to cool off this GPU, especially since the junction, peak temperature, goes way over 100°C.
Getting the Radeon 7 cooler
AMD countered that with the auto undervolting option, which can easily be found in AMD Radeon Settings control panel, basically, you need few mouse clicks to get to it and enable it under Gaming, then Global settings and then Global Wattman, click the auto undervolt and that’s it, pretty straightforward. I did that right away, which as you can see here in my direct comparison with the stock out-of-the-box settings, yielded better results for Radeon VII. The core voltage was down by, 06 volts compared to the stock results as you can see it here, which meant the GPU was not getting as hot, which meant the fan speed could go down, and it did, by about 100-200 RPM in games, even lower in some synthetic GPU benchmark runs. The edge temperature was more or less the same compared to the stock figures, roaming around 70°C, but on the other hand, the junction temperature went below 100°C. What was interesting to see is that the performance and clock figures went up for a bit, so when you draw the line, using auto undervolt option you’ll get a bit quieter and slightly better performing GPU.
But, I wasn’t here just for that, I wanted to go a step further by incorporating some overclocking into the mix. Here I before all tried to find the right sweet-spot between getting that extra performance and not getting too noisy, and although I could ramp up the GPU clock speed to around 1950 MHz, it just wasn’t worth that extra noise, higher temperatures and power consumption on a count of the necessity to bump up the core voltage some more, so I’ve settled down as you can see with these settings here.
The memory was maxed out and rock stable at 1200 MHz, it didn’t affect anything else around it, so I had no worries about that, while the 1002 mV core voltage and 1909 MHz core clock settings resulted in it roaming anywhere from 1850 MHz to around 1930 MHz in games with core voltage being at 1006 mV according to GPUz readings. Yes, I know that I’ve just read a lot of numbers back to you, but bottom line I manage to get even lower core voltage than with auto undervolt option while having higher clocks and also pulling down the power limit by 5%. The temperatures and the fan speeds were were more or less the same compared to the auto undervolting option, maybe just a tad lower fan speed since I’ve decided to tone it down a bit, do a manual fan curve based on what I saw in terms of temperature movement under load as the default fan curve is pretty aggressive. Either way, you’ll have to cope with some noise in order to get that extra performance.
Radeon VII undervolt guide
After that I went in for another search, search for what I thought are the best under-volt, power, and clocks settings, with a goal of lowering down the fan speed, noise, and temperature, while taking a minimal performance hit. In my Radeon VII undervolt case and for my sample of I’ve found that around 900 mV of core voltage was ideal, with again maxed out 1200 MHz of video memory speed since it doesn’t affect stability of the card, -10% on the power limit and core clock speed set at 1740 MHz, which resulted in it being anywhere from around 1700 MHz to even close to 1800 MHz while gaming. Despite the lower clock speeds, the overall performance figures were just a tad lower, but as you can see here, the junction temperature was way below 100°C, even below 90°C, and that’s now becoming a decent figure compared to our starting point, while the GPU edge temperature also finally came down below that magic 70°C number. Fan speeds came way down this time, around 1700-1800 RPM, which was now really acceptable noise wise, and that’s also with a manually set fan curve from my side.
Finally, let me just put everything side by side, all the different profiles and settings I’ve tried here, their outcomes in terms of GPU temperatures, fan speeds, loudness, power consumption’s and performance figures in 3DMark, so you can see for yourself what kind of difference can be achieved by playing around with Radeon 7 Wattman settings, it’s nothing complicated, all you basically need is some time out of your day.
All in all, this was a very interesting experiment from my side, I really enjoyed it and I might start doing undervolts as a regular thing within my graphics card reviews, what do you think about? Tell me in the comments down below if you like that idea! I hope at least one of you will find this useful, at some type of guidance, cause I said before, your outcome, can differ depending from sample to sample.
That’s it for this time from me, thank you for your support, I hope this Radeon VII undervolt guide helped you in reach that sweet spot, if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, or you can contact me via my social media channels!
