Does underclocking reduce power consumption?

[Grinder]

And you are wrong when you imply that the gpu temperature has no effect on the other components on board, the heat WILL transfer on to the other components, whether it be heat transferred by airflow, or heat transferred by PCB. (The PCB is actually pretty good at transferring heat, try to put your hand on the back side of your video card, and you'll see what I mean. There is no magic to be pulled off here, things will get hot)

But then I didn't say it has no effect. Why do you have to pretend I say something different from what I do all the time? I could just as well say that by your logic, if the GPU temperature is 90C then the temperature of the entire room the computer sits in will also be 90C.

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[nebiki]

And you are wrong when you imply that the gpu temperature has no effect on the other components on board, the heat WILL transfer on to the other components, whether it be heat transferred by airflow, or heat transferred by PCB. (The PCB is actually pretty good at transferring heat, try to put your hand on the back side of your video card, and you'll see what I mean. There is no magic to be pulled off here, things will get hot)

But then I didn't say it has no effect. Why do you have to pretend I say something different from what I do all the time? I could just as well say that by your logic, if the GPU temperature is 90C then the temperature of the entire room the computer sits in will also be 90C.

if no heat is able to escape your room, that's true. well, not quite, because you'll have a constant delta of extra energy being transfered into your system, so after a while your temps will be even higher. i hope that makes sense. temperature = energy.

[KKAtan]

And you are wrong when you imply that the gpu temperature has no effect on the other components on board, the heat WILL transfer on to the other components, whether it be heat transferred by airflow, or heat transferred by PCB. (The PCB is actually pretty good at transferring heat, try to put your hand on the back side of your video card, and you'll see what I mean. There is no magic to be pulled off here, things will get hot)

But then I didn't say it has no effect. Why do you have to pretend I say something different from what I do all the time? I could just as well say that by your logic, if the GPU temperature is 90C then the temperature of the entire room the computer sits in will also be 90C.

I'm sorry if I gave you that impression. I didn't mean it that way.

But here:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/825-4/dossier-nvidia-repond-amd-avec-geforce-gtx-590.html

These are heat measured by infrared, should be good enough to illustrate my point.
http://i54.tinypic.com/2heiivt.jpg
This nvidiacard has VRM overloaded at +110C, and its surroundings are +90C.
The core on the right is measured to 84C, but its surrounding pcb area also goes +90C.
And to the far left of both cores you can see a brown spot, that's heat that most likely came from air flow. And of course the motherboard, it takes a lot of heat from the video card too, maybe not so much in this picture(only orange), but in the website I linked to is another image, the motherboard takes up a significant amount of heat(brown).

We shouldn't underestimate the heat that the PCB and air flow can transfer.

[rethaw]

Do you have a FLIR camera!?!? If so, you could answer some very interesting questions about airflow.

[Starcraftman]

Before I broke my kill-a-watt, I did experiment with this a bit. From my messing around I found that my Sapphire 5830's at 980 core and 300 mem (800 and 1000 stock), actually used less power than at stock speeds! It was only about 10 watts, but its still great news for efficiency with those cards. Depending on the type of cooler your card has this could also effect core temperatures, but on my 5830's the cooler does not touch the ram, so it did nothing for my core temperatures. This probably wont hold true for all cards, but in my experience, it is worth it to downclock your memory, since the lower power consumption gives you extra core overclocking headroom while (probably) staying within the rated TDP of the card and its cooler.

[bronan]

Well i have my fair share on nvidia and ati cards i even had some 4890 cards running and those where extreme hotheads
We measured at some days even 105 c which is even for that card a considerable heat but it actually never failed
Nevertheless when i contacted XFX about these cards running such high temps they offered to rma the cards
I talked alot with XFX and EVGA about maximum temps of certain models and the rule is for a videocard its ok to run around 90c for longer periods with some peaks to about 100c but this should not last long, the cooler you can keep your cards the longer they will live.
Another thing even though some think it is not good to have very high temps on some spots on motherboards/videocards there are actually chips who are made to run at extreme heat.
I remember a chip near the northbridge running a constant 140c asking the builder confirmed it was designed to even run at 180c so even though it scared the hell out of us its is not allways a bad thing.

Now back to videocards the most important rule i have about them is keep them clean, basically i allways clean the cards fan every month from dust and use canned air to blow dust of the internal heatsink so it keeps having a free airflow.

Now my experience is that i get a good drop in temps when you run the ram at low speeds 300Mhz will do fine on most modern cards and cause they are almost all gddr5 do keep at low speeds enough power left to run smooth.
And to answer your question, yes dropping the core speed will reduce some of the power consumption also

Now on the fact that the nvidia lovers like to say those cards are better then amd are simply wrong. Amd its cards has much higher quality components then the nvidia counterparts no matter what some say.
Many 580 en 590 burned out with not so super high temps, this did not happen to any ati card as far as i know.
The reason why amd also wanted a limit on the top models is simple.
When overclocking these cards and especially the dual gpu it is ofcourse asking for a problem.
Keeping a single model is already hard enough to cool.
To cool such dual monster as the 5990, 6990 or nv590 is a pain in the behind for all designers.
Its extreme difficult to get the heat out of the card, because of the cramped space.

[chungenhung]

Yeah, I read on another board from an Nvidia expert saying that as long you keep your temps below 100° and you notice that your system is still stable, these hot temperatures are no problem.

So if you can mine with your cards at 90° with a smooth and stable system, there's nothing to worry about.

Agree.
I used to run my 9800GX2 at 105C for 2 yrs, and nothing happened.

[st4rdust]

Just get used to sleeping with the fans at full speed. Do it like this: every evening, increase the fan speed by 1% or so from the previous night, and soon you won't notice that the fan is running at full speed.

I started putting in earplugs before I go to sleep. The first night I tried this, I thought this was a pretty clever idea until the next morning when, not only the noise of my mining rigs was blocked out, but also the sound of my alarm going off.

If you try this, remember to make the appropriate adjustments to your alarm.