Buildzoid is back after a wee break from the limelight of his Actually Hardcore Overclocking YouTube channel. The topic of his latest video is the new AMD Vega series of graphics cards. . After killing a few of the AMD Frontier cards in apparently quite unspectacular fashion (no smoke or even odd smells, disappointingly for his fans), he decided to get down to the much safer challenge of Undervolting an AMD Vega 64 card. In his own words, “here’s your freaking undervolting video!” He also notes that the card was donated to him by his new channel sponsor Alza, one of Europe’s premier electronics e-retailers that more and more, are catering for Extreme Overclockers.

The video kicks off with him running 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme with all tessellation and other setting set at default. The first thing he notes with his multimeter while running the card under load is that the default configuration on air is already undervolting to some extent. The multimeter shows a reading of just under 1V due to power and thermal throttling. The consumption at the wall is around is around 390 watts. The plan is to reduce voltage and then increase frequency, which at will ultimately keep power consumption at the same 390 watts delta while also improving scores.

At stock settings in 3DMark FSE with a Core i7 7700K running at 5.1GHz, he’s getting scores at around 9,600 marks. A decent score, sure - but it’s one that can be improved a fair bit to around a 12K+ score, and of course even further by used improved cooling such as a waterblock. Undervolting essentially reduces thermal load and therefore throttling, giving you more space to improve frequency targets. It may seem like an odd approach, but at the end of the day, it’s all about how AMD have designed these cards and these new Vega GPUs. It also involves figuring out how the slightly buggy default drivers and software react, as he explains. Improve voltage efficiency to reduce thermals. Get more headroom to improve frequencies and scores.

Find the video from Buildzoid here on the Actually Hardcore Overclocking YouTube channel. .