oh my God that's your notes for this video oh no I I have a tiny bit more
stuff down here the point is we thought
RTX 490 pretty fast but could it be
faster good timing for that we're going to be taking this 490 stricks from its
stock 450 WS of power consumption all
the way to 1,000 Watts then we're going
to be adding external voltage modification and chilled water cooling
thanks to our thermoflex 5000 to see
just how far this baby can fly fly like
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check it out the link below one of the coolest things about modern gpus is
their ability to dynamically boost their clock speeds in order to deliver the
best possible gaming experience but as you can imagine they can't just boost
infinitely so there are three main factors that we need to overcome if we
want to increase their performance the first is the thermal limit this
intuitively is put in place to prevent your card from cooking itself in its
attempts to run cyberpunk at 500 frames per second that we're not worried about
today though because one this cooler is totally overbuilt this card survived at
80° in a thermal chamber it's frosting over already Al off and two by the time
we're done we're going to be running this Quantum Vector Square GPU block on
it our main focus today then is how to overcome the other two the voltage limit
and current limit for voltage control we're going to be using this cool little
doohickey from Elmore Labs it used to be that through software you could just
adjust the voltage on your GPU but then NVIDIA went
I'm pretty sure that's exactly the email they sent out and made their Partners
lock down voltage control thankfully with a relatively simple soldering job
and a USBC connection to this board that functionality can be restored as for
current we were planning to do a shunt mod again like we did with the 3090
where we trick the onboard controller into thinking that it's putting out half
as much power as it actually is but this
time thanks to NVIDIA's control freak nature it turns out we don't even have
to floating around the internet are modded 1,000 watt bioses for the RTX 490
whether these came from enterprising users or were leaked for manufacturers
we have no way of knowing but we do know that at some point in the development
process the 490 was intended to be a much more power hungry card so we kind
of suspect the former and as it turns out you don't even necessarily need to
have a matching card to flash these bioses users have reported taking a
mismatch BIOS flashing it to their card and it firing right up so thanks NVIDIA
for making all 490s the same I guess
convenient couple terrifying things about this BIOS first of all it removes
temperature protections which is really yeah absolutely terrifying we can just
super easy to cook it yeah and then G will come over here murder us yeah and
for another obviously it removes the current protection which exists for a
reason so a our power connector to the
board is only rated for 600 watts not 1,000 - 7
925 watts and for another the vrms on
this board are a not designed to have
1,000 Watts going through them and B I don't even know if they're going to be
cooled by the block cuz this is also not designed with 1,000 watts in mind it's
probably fine it's probably fine before we do any of that though we need to
establish our Baseline performance so that we know if anything we're doing is
even helping this is our results for f122 what is interesting is we can see
that the performance cap reason is just voltage regulation that is what's
holding us back okay and our maximum
draw was somewhere around 390 yeah 390
Watts that's a lot of Watts we could do better though that isn't the only number
we need though there is some Performance Tuning that we can do without getting
super sketchy by firing up GPU twerk
really oh tweak that makes more sense by firing up GPU tweak 3 my vision's going
we can adjust our power Target turn down in some cases our GPU voltage no we just
crank it really it has no down by adjusting our power Target our GPU
voltage our boost clock and maybe we'll throw a bit of a memory overclock on it
sure we should be able to eek out a little bit more performance in a way we
would actually recommend replicating at home our power Target is now 120 that's
as high as it'll let us go plus 200 on the core Plus 900 on the memory I think
it'll be fine the hot spot is the one we're particularly going to want to keep
a close eye on because that's the one that especially with so much power
running through it is going to spike extremely quickly in the absence of
adequate cooling I mean it seems to be still working yeah just let it let it do
this thing I mean we can tell that the hot spot is the hotter one way to go yep
it's very not happy yeah we we clearly do need more voltage yep should we just
send it maybe it was our core clock we'll
adjust both at the same time okay here we go holy crap yeah it's nearly running
at 3 GHz that's pretty fast okay what are we limited by voltage voltage okay
if we want to get more clock speed then we're going to need more
voltage oh one second okay well I guess that test isn't valid anymore I was just
going to see okay 100% it apply sure wow
that actually worked uh now we're drawing 430 Watts okay and the GPU
clock's higher that was easy based on the
scaling we're seeing here man we might
be able to go quite a bit higher maybe or the card will just blow up for
just taking some sliders and going like that we went from we just got 12% more
performance yeah and like our minimums went up by a lot that's awesome yeah
overclocking who knew let's go faster before we volt mod this 490 we need to
make sure that we're actually modifying the voltages and not just some number on
the screen is changing to do that we need to be able to probe this card now I
don't know exactly where we can find core and memory voltages but I think
there are some headers right here and if we just solder a couple wires to those
we are good let's find out what these actually
do what we're really concerned about here is the core voltage it is just at
idle so it is currently 0.885 volts that's what we're looking
for 0.89 that's probably it I don't know
if you've watched previous attempts of Alex and I to try and sold the reg
graphic card um they usually don't go too well ah it's such a bad SW IR dude
it's on I'm not joking why is it so crap
pretty terrible what are you going to do with those wires I think I was s of them right there oh okay yeah uh all right
that's probably fine and then like what are you going to use to measure that uh and aamus oh
no yeah no one's getting lead poisoning
today so I'm just going to hold it there for a while it's the small things in
life you got to like man okay I think we're done uh sure there you
go so there's hot glue on it oh yeah
strain relief and so it's safe the best
part is we didn't quite do it right so to look at the voltage you uh you need
to probe one of these guys to get ground but uh there it is uh 89 volts is
what we're drawing at idol so uhhuh we
now know that it works pretty good and you're just going to drag that all over
the back of the card like that kind of what I was thinking yeah we'll see if we can get to any traces and short it out
and kill it you were moving I can hold this it
took a while but the evc2 is working
it's the sort of thing where like you know when you get something off GitHub and you have to like you install a
software and the drivers but for the drivers to work you need a specific
version of java which requires Visual and all of that stuff it took me a
couple hours but it's working yeah when he told me that he needed about half an
hour I told the guys over there no less than an hour mhm it has now been four
yes oh my God it's not even bolted to
the Alex yeah you've only got four
screws in it we can add more if you want
but then we have to add the black plate ah it's fine it's fine H oh the system
works okay wonderful we're at 089 so
this right here is telling you everything that's happening with the voltage controller at the moment yeah
1.05 yeah yeah 1.0
is how accurate is this uh multimeter do
I trust this or that you sort of don't
trust either of them sick basically what
we're doing here so 06 whatever you can
see here like before we are voltage limited so you can go in here via offset
how about 05 yeah sure okay and are we going to see this just waa
W hello you can see the board power draw
right there there we
go that's the sort of speed we're looking for wow oh that's a lot of power
draw over 3 GHz over 500
watts 81° C and we're still voltage regulated oh
oh it's a power for a second it did there it is that little tiny green blip
there I feel like if we give it just like the tiniest bit more voltage power
is going to be our problem hear you loud and clear okay how
about 065 sure now let's see is it going to
get is it even going to impact it midun
yeah see this is weird the power draw goes up but the frequency doesn't we oh
because we are power limited now yeah
wow we're just shy of 600 watts sir
should we do a run at 600 WTS and see what we end up with then the GPU chip
alone is drawing over 500 watts that's a
lot of power for one of those little guys it's like unfathomable right like
those damn yeah let's get more power all
right cool to flash your BIOS it's actually pretty easy what you need is
Envy flash which a little application here you put that in the root of your
thing hold on can we just set the card back to default before we do that yes
yeah and I'm going to do that over here too before you update any kind of
firmware be it on your motherboard or GPU you should return your entire system
to stock settings and ideally you should be on a battery backup if for whatever
reason the power fails in the middle of a firmware update it might
survive it probably won't see Alex over
your I've seen things survive with this GPU it's it's a little bit less risky
because we do have two bioses so if we completely bork one of them flip her
over other one still is probably good before you change your BIOS you want to
just make sure that the one that's on there you have saved so just GPU Z quick
right there save the file even if you never plan to roll it back if you ever
needed to ARM your card back to the manufacturer for example you would need
to return it to its stock configuration not that you're ring this once you've
soldered things to it but if you didn't do that
now we can have a look at our BIOS wow
wow that's uh that's something yep we're
in The Matrix now boys oh oh wait um I think I wait stop
oh maybe it's fine now we maybe have the
ability to murder this GPU if we so want now we cook uh I think one 80 is where
it was happy okay firing it up oh this
is scary hold on we can do the math here it's at
14% of its TDP and the board power is
142 Watts okay okay it thinks it's a
th000 watt card you know NVIDIA is going to lock this down with the next gen and
I remember when they were cool we're in kind of scary territory now as far as
voltage goes okay and we're at 66° and
480 Watts we got a result but it's not
going to be any faster yeah 145 that's an improvement oh that's a
sizable Improvement really what were we before we started at 137 oh all right
yeah cool I mean it was a rock solid
3.03 GHz didn't move are we going to run out
of GPU twerk slider here I doubt it okay
was that 210 I'm going to give her another 20 140
average yeah she's fast but she's not
consuming power how do we keep the card from
kicking in its voltage cap like we're not thermally limited though something
else is the problem it'll probably boost a little higher just being cooler but I
don't think that's the issue here no all right I figured out what the problem was
before we were only setting a voltage offset now I've like haveed the offset
but increased the vo command so that seems to have broader voltage to where
first of all the computers reading a lot more accurate and also I have got some
very high temperatures I turn it down a tiny bit but uh yeah they more
protections not a thing on this GPU anymore it's absolutely terrifying so uh
I'll just give this a tiny bit more guess might be fine it might not be fine
I don't know let's see tiny bit faster I
have to watch the Hotpot temperature very closely cuz if that starts jumping
up we just need to Al have four and get out of here oh that is fast 30
120 drawing 540 Watts not bad I'm
shocked how well this cooler works FPS is the same but that's about expected I
think we're about at the point though where to go faster we need more cooling
so water cooling down you you want to hear the most absolutely shocking thing
Andrew yes I have not quite thought
through how this GPU is going to go in
for whatever reason our ground lead here doesn't seem to be working so I have
this in continuity motor right now beeps touch it to ground does not beep before
we put this in there I want this to just work and not have to worry about this
lead kind of falling off and ending up somewhere bad kind of like that one right
there all right I think we're all good to put it
in here we
go it's kind of sketchy something like
uh
that wow this really isn't all that sketchy but it sure is H looks like it I
want to make sure that all of this is working perfectly before I turn the
system on because if there's air bubbles in here there is currently no
temperature protection on the GPU so it will actually just kill itself if I'm
not like proper running water through
it might as well top it
up okay GPU hotspot 17° we're good heck
yeah one thing that I like to do if you hit Windows control shift
B like so it resets your video driver
which can be quite helpful when you're crashing a video card a bunch of times
well I think you did a fine job oh I know look at at the safety
straps so secure genius I always forget
about the capabilities of this Chiller she's chilly it's very good at its job
unfortunately it doesn't really need to because what we've discovered is that
this RTX 490 and for that matter pretty
much all of them is not thermally
limited in any way and in fact it's not
even really current limited is it yeah
no we solved the problem where we uh
accidentally were applying a voltage rather than a voltage offset but what we
discovered is that even though we were able to get the power consumption up
like 580 I think is as high as I saw it
doesn't impact performance anymore yeah
unless of course we were to apply dangerously high voltages but we're
trying to do this somewhat responsibly I don't know I had pretty dangerous
voltages there and like it doesn't go faster I guess the conclusion is twofold
then one there's definitely performance to ring out of the RTX 490 if only
NVIDIA would give us the bloody controls to do it and two they made the right
call to ship it at 450 Watts given how close the performance is to the 600 wat
configuration like this right here is probably as fast as it'll go I play with
the memory a little bit you can get it going like 100 mahz faster but at the
same time I found that the actual scores went down so
I'm guessing that it was not quite stable you're riding that Razor's Edge
yeah NVIDIA gpus will pull back clocks for a couple Cycles if they think
they're going to crash and so even though the number will be higher like in
GPU Z the actual score is lower
so we're ra at the limit at the limit of
telling you about our sponsor oh first I want to see if we can hit the limit of
our power supply oh God we could give it
a tiny bit more voltage get it up to about 500 80 Watts the CPU even though
we don't have like the direct die cooler on it we can get a pretty easy like 400
out of thanks to this
guy that's getting pretty close to the 12200 not quite okay let's see how good
of a power supply Corsair makes oh she
get CPU speed has oh wow we're at over
600 watts on the GPU now oh yes what's
the Hotpot temperature 73 okay that's fine I think
that's not hot spot hot spot's 95 95 oh
that's hot Will Smith that is hot how's our CPU
doing 6 GHz casual
no and the RGB turned off did we call it
editor please cut out the awkward pause while I was thinking of that just use a
punch in or something if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy the
last time we did this in an even sketchier fashion with a shunt mod
that one Drew like over 12200 WTS didn't it I don't remember I think it could but
I don't know if it did