I have overclocked cards a few times, but never dabbled much into undervolting until now. In this post I’ll be giving a brief overview on how I undervolted my Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, and the results I got.

I was inspired to write this post after being unable to find for other people’s experiences undervolting the 2060 Super, so thought I’d throw my results out there.


This is not a step-by-step tutorial! For that I’d suggest this post.

Spoiler: I settled on a clock of 1680MHz with a max voltage of 775mV. This is a fairly sizable reduction from the boost clock of 1830MHz and max clock of 1965MHz, but I felt very happy with it. This resulted in a performance drop of just under 9%, but lowered temps by over 14%, and gave power savings of 35%!


Requirements:

  • MSI Afterburner (for modifying clock & power settings)
  • HWiNFO (for monitoring temperature and GPU power usage)
  • 3DMark Demo (free on steam, we’ll be using its Time Spy benchmark)

Optional:

  • Wattmeter to measure total system power usage.

Methodology:

  • Close all unecessary programs, open HWiNFO, and run the Time Spy benchmark.
  • Record maximum temperature and wattage of gpu, and (optionally) max system power usage from wattmeter.

I ran this test 3 times, clearing HWiNFO’s recorded data each time. My average results were as follows:

Max Clock GPU Score GPU Power GPU Temp Total Power
1965MHz 9063 220W 76 C 299W

So next I set a max clock of 1935MHz, and lowered the power in increments of 25mV, running the benchmark each time to record results and test stability. Here are the results until failure.

Max Voltage Max Clock GPU Score GPU Power GPU Temp Total Power
950mV 1935MHz 9073 218W 75 C 297W
925mV 1935MHz 9172 217W 75 C 299W
900mV 1935MHz 9177 208W 73 C 293W
875mV 1935MHz FAILED FAILED FAILED FAILED

So, by reducing our max clock from 1965MHz to 1935MHz, and limiting voltage to 900mV, we ended up with:

  • ~1% performance increase
  • ~5% GPU power saving
  • ~4% GPU temperature reduction
  • ~2% system power saving

Nothing to write home about.

I experimented with different voltages and clock speeds for a while, before settling on the following.

Max Voltage Max Clock
775mV 1680MHz

The sharp-eyed among you may notice that this clock is 8% less than the standard boost, and a whopping 14%+ lower than the original max clock! Nevertheless, the results were still attractive.

Max Voltage Max Clock GPU Score GPU Power GPU Temp Total Power
775mV 1680MHz 8265 143W 65 C 224W

As mentioned at the top of this post, that’s

  • Less than 9% peformance reduction
  • Over 14% lower max GPU temperature
  • 35% GPU power saving
  • Over 25% total system power saving

I’ve been using this clock and undervolt for a couple of days now, and have had no issues (yet) in games or other applications. For completeness’ sake I may run a stress test at some point to prove stability, but I’m not too worried about it.

--- EDIT 10/06/2022 ---

It has now been over a year since I first tested this undervolt, and I’m happy to report it is still working perfectly!