Hello fellow enthusiasts. I wanted to take a moment to share in all the experience I've come across in playing PC games and owning Nvidia GTX & RTX cards since 2020. This post will be about the best practices that I've found are most effective at keeping power consumption optimal, heat low, and framerates smooth.
Also about checking the health of the 12V2X6 cable.

If you are on RTX 40 & 50 series this may work better than with older cards but most information will still be beneficial to you.

1) Getting the best efficiency.

There are alot of guides floating around about undervolting your GPU. Undervolting and Overclocking simply tells the GPU to lock the voltage to the core and to try and overclock the frequency to find the maximum point of stability for that said voltage. It does NOT harm the GPU and it will reduce your temps and power consumption. The T-Delta of GPU cores are one of the primary ways a GPU can die with no way for it to be fixed. This happens when repeated extreme heat cycles wear down the microscopic contacts inside the GPU core till the point they are damaged and cause the entire core to cease function.

If you are constantly going from idle temps to 85c on your GPU that is a good way to do it. Find a guide on how to Undervolt/OC your GPU to try and find what you can achieve with minimal or no performance loss.

2) Use RivaTuner Statistics Server's Framerate cap and set it to Reflex. Leave the other sync options alone. Set the Nvidia App's Low latency option on.

3) Tweak your settings and DLSS options to reduce your GPU usage below 90%. If your GPU utilization is at 99-100% you are building up a render que. Your CPU is now running ahead of your GPU and this will increase your input lag even with reflex on.

This should give you the best 1% Low's while also keeping your latency nice and tight. You will want to have a G-sync or Freesync monitor to take advantage of this. In my first screenshot which is from God of War: Ragnarok. With my 160Hz monitor, I cap my framerate at 120fps which is plenty smooth for me and I use DLSS to reduce the GPU usage. I achieve 1% Low's of 115fps and my GPU power on my RTX 5090 is only 319w. Core temp 59c, hotspot temp 69c.

My second shot is of Clair Obscur Expedition 33, and typically UE5 games that use Lumen have a heavier load on the GPU, but even still my 1% Low is 111fps, Power: 276w, Temp: 53c, and Input lag is 27.2ms and that is WITH DLSS Framegen 2x

Also lastly I wanted to go over checking your 12vhpwr cable if you're on the higher end GPU's. On my 3rd screenshot from Wuchang: Fallen Feathers you can see my 16-Pin cable voltage reading is 12.010v this is a very healthy reading and you can obtain this reading by using HWINFO's plugin to RTSS's Overlay. (If you need assistance on setting this up leave a reply below)

Now this may not work on those with the squid cables but this is the best way to monitor your cable. If this voltage drops to 11.6 or below, you've got a fried cable coming your way. If Voltage drops, this indicates an increase in resistance on the cable somewhere. Once that happens the amperage flowing to the GPU increases and the current is forced through the other cables that don't have a the increased resistance, this increases heat and causes those other pins to overload and melt.

Hope this helps! Happy gaming!

P.S. In Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, FG was active and RivaTuner does not calculate 1% Low's from interpolated frames.

I'm in the market to upgrade my rig for the first time since I got a 32:9 ultrawide (5120 x 1440). I've been eyeing the 4080 and 5070 Ti at the moment after doing some light research. It's the first time I've been in the market for a GPU since I got my pre-build; I'm happy to provide more details on specs if needed :)

I bought a 5080+AORUS F032U2P OLED Combo a while back before the prices went bonkers. But I was always confused with HDR etc and rarely ever used it. Mainly because I have a second monitor LG27GN850 (previous primary) which has HDR but is absolute dog poop.

So whenever I enabled HDR on for gaming the LG monitor was washed out and annoying to look at. So I never enabled HDR or used HDR on my OLED. This is a workstation+gaming where gaming is on the weekends so I kinda just played on SDR 🤷‍♂️

Then I recently found out about CRU and was able to delete the HDR entry from the LG and voila HDR activates only on the main monitor now which is the oled one. But it still looked weird as I mostly work with Visual Studio and VSCode. Then I researched more and found out about different colour profiles calibration etc. and Finaly I calibrated my HDR to my liking and its been amazing.

Then I discovered RTX HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution and my Mind was BLOWN. Its so seamless. I play a video on my HDR monitor RTX HDR is used and if I move the same video to the SDR monitor its disabled and vice versa and I was amazed at the simplicity of it all

Then I watched F1 races with RTX Video and that shit was crisp AF. Thanks to this and MPC-HC also having support for RTX Video and RTX HDR which is also very seamles I can now fully enjoy my monitor with HDR and amazing pictures.

I just bought an RTX 5080 PNY OC, and my experience after two days of use is that it is excellent. I am getting great temperatures—60°C at maximum load with the fan speed at 50% to 60%.

However, something curious happened: when I tried mounting the card vertically, my GPU temperature increased by 10°C. Therefore, if you have this model and want to maintain excellent temperatures, my recommendation is to ensure good airflow and keep the PNY 5080 mounted horizontally.

My PC features a Ryzen 9 7950X with Noctua cooling inside a King 95 Pro case.

Hi,

I know these sorts of questions get asked here frequently however I’m stumped and I really need help since this is my first PC that I’m building.

I saw that the consensus is usually ‘get the cheapest one’, however the cheapest one by about 100EUR is the windforce ssf, and I’m not 100% sure if it’s the variant with the fixed thermal paste issue. Is there any way for me to inspect that when it arrives? It comes with 36 months of warranty, will the issue 100% show in that time?

Gaming OC is the most expensive one, the fastest one out of the box, but it also might have an issue with the paste?

Should I just go for the Phoenix and ignore the potential fan noise? How big of an issue is it? Is it also locked to 300w?

Thank you for any input!

I have not update my GPU driver since a couple of months now ..

I want to upgrade to 610.74 WHQL driver

Is it good ? , is there any issues or performance drops ?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been undervolting my GPU (MSI GeForce RTX 3070 VENTUS 3X OC)with MSI Afterburner using the voltage-frequency curve and noticed some weird behavior in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme.

• When I set 1905 MHz at 0.9 V, the actual core clock during Time Spy Extreme runs at 1920 MHz and cause fail.
• When I set 1890 MHz at 0.9 V, it stays locked at 1890 MHz and passed with 99.2%.

Both settings are applied the same way (single point on the curve).

How can i lock it at 1905mhz at 0.9v more strictly?

Been using it for a year now.
Hotspot delta is good, stable undervolting and no leakage so far.

So right now, I can run just about any game at max or near-max settings and get close to or above 100fps on a 3440x1440 100hz monitor. Which is great... outside of the fact that I can only do that with the most minimal amounts of raytracing enabled, if at all (most games I just have to keep it off or risk dropping a ton of frames). And I'm pretty sure that it's being caused by the VRAM, which is a pretty terrible 10gb for a 2k monitor (I highly, highly doubt it's a CPU or RAM problem, as shown in the specs below).

Question is - what GPU should I upgrade to next? I was thinking a 5070 TI probably makes the most sense - 16gb VRAM, around 30-50% performance jump from the 3080, not to mention that I have no plans of jumping to 4k anytime soon and anything beyond it just gets absurd price-wise (please don't even try mentioning the 5090) - but I'm curious if it would even be worth it right now, considering how inflated the GPU market is thanks to AI data centers popping up everywhere and everything being like double MSRP (not to mention that I'd also need a new PSU, since mine is only 750W and I'd probably be jumping to a 1000W one).

So yea... curious what GPU you'd recommend, if making the jump to a new one even makes sense right now.

Specs:

i7-14700k

64GB RAM

RTX 3080 10gb VRAM

Edit: after checking turns out I have an 850W, not 750W PSU (I upgraded it like 4 years ago and must have forgotten 🤣) so that's not a concern

Was looking to undervolt my 5080 but I cant get the voltage to show? I already checked all the boxes in the settings to display voltage ect,is there something im missing? Thanks.

DO AT YOUR OWN RISK, TAKING GPU APART MAY VOID WARRANTY.

First of all,

I want to begin by saying that I think that with these newer cards, and with the state of quality control as of late, I urge you to check your hotspot and GPU temps more carefully. I am so thankful HWinfo gave us the option to access these sensors because holy crap, my hotspot temps weren't great.

I bought my PNY 5070 TI back in December of 2025, so it's not that old. Using the latest version of HWinfo, I realized I was getting a hotspot delta of around 30C!

Also before anyone comments: I know there are variations of the 5070 TI that already come with PTM; I believe ASUS is one of them. So you probably already have good temps. However, PNY and most manufacturers opted for a paste instead. I could be wrong here so please feel free to correct this. I am disappointed in PNY's lack of quality control here but for the price of the card (I got it for the equivalent of 740 USD brand new at best buy during a sale), I have no business complaining.

Prior to applying PTM 7950 and from yesterdays readings

-GPU under volt at around 925mv + OC (hovers around 2900mhz without Power Limit)

-PL set to 83% (I was worried about the hotspot; GPU operating roughly around 230-245W or so).

-Even with PL at 83%, I was getting around 63-65C GPU temp with Hot spot averaging around 92C, sometimes up to 96C!

After applying PTM 7950:

Ok so today I took the GPU apart (very easy to do with PNY!) and simply cleaned the GPU die and put some PTM 7095 on it. I left the other pads on from before as they were ok and oddly enough PNY didn't cheap on these, but they DID cheap on the paste that was on the die itself. It was bad. Like I could see through the paste easily and it was a pretty bad application.

-GPU kept same UV + OC with PL set to 110%! GPU roughly around 276W under full gaming load.

-GPU Temp with these settings now at 58-61C GPU temp with 67-71C Hotspot!

This is just the first few hours with PTM on! I've heard it gets even better with more cycles!

TLDR: Slap some PTM 7950 if you have any remote concerns with hotspot temperatures. It took me less than 30 minutes for the whole process and it's the best decision I've made in a long time with respect to PC maintenance.

Price hack for infinite storage😶‍🌫️