Quote Originally Posted by ryboto View Post
If I load up ati catalyst control center while my pc is just displaying 2d graphics, the core and memory clock of my HD 3870 is 300/800...just ask any 3870 owner, it's a video card version of cool n quiet.
Ofcourse I know ATI cards have different performance levels since the R520. I never said that they don't. You seem to be completely ignoring my post about deviders and some problems that come with some of them.
There are third party bios editors, that were announced in the news section here. I've used it. You can change 3 different settings, since there are 3 power planes. One is idle/2d, where there's gpu/ram speed, and a voltage adjustment for the gpu, there's a middle range clock speed, can't remember it's numbers because I didn't touch it, and there's a full 3d clock speed, 777/1125?. The voltages were 1.1ish, 1.2ish and 1.37...i think. I changed the idle/2d to 0.975, considering dropping it to the lowest, 0.9v. I've seen a slight drop of 1-2W in idle, so I think it did make work, it's just that at idle, the GPU at these settings is probably already using a minimum, it's other components on the card that are drawing power.
Let's just say 3-4W as your reading my be off by a little. You used a kill-a-watt kind of thing? Well they are for measuring in 1W accuracy But let's just say 3-4W.

You lowered the vGPU by roughly 10%. This means the new vGPU has a relative value of 0.9 (90%) to the old 1.1ish vGPU. Power draw scales roughly exponentially with voltage in these chips. So: 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.81. This means 3-4W is +-19% of the stock idle power draw. 3-4/19 * 100 = 16-21W, this would be the stock power draw of the R670 in 2D. Now add 3-4W for power regulation on the board and you can imagine the memory doesn't use a lot of power. This is normal because GDDR4 was especially designed to save energy in idle mode, just look-up the tech behind it, it's interesting stuff.


Which is why i suggesting maybe they're dropping ram clocks now too, doubtful, it could be possible that they're not just undervolting, but shutting down some of the stream processors?
Take a look at the tech papers on GDDR4. I think that the ICs that are used on todays GDDR4 graphics card use about 0.3W/IC in idle (at full speed). There's not much to gain there

And please don't tell me anything about BIOS modding, I'm sick of HEX