**The Great Graphics Card Experiment: A Cautionary Tale**

I'm not sure what possessed me to take out my trusty RX 570 and attempt to edit its BIOS with GPU-Z, but it seemed like a great idea at the time. I had heard of people doing it before, and I figured, "Why not?" After all, I was using my RX 560 as a display output to flash a new BIOS onto the RX 570. It was a bold move, even for me.

As I delved deeper into the BIOS editing process, things started to get weird. My PC began acting strangely, and it would only output a graphic signal over the RX 560, no matter which other graphics card I tried. I spent hours playing around with it, trying to figure out what was going on, but nothing seemed to work.

In desperation, I cleared the CMOS of my motherboard to see if that would do anything. And then... disaster struck. There was a puff of blue smoke, and that lovely smell of burnt cabbage filled the air. My motherboard had died, luckily leaving my GTX 1080 graphics card unscathed.

Now, I'm not sure what exactly killed the test system, but I think it may have been my own negligence around static in this dry Vancouver climate. Last year, I even managed to set fire to a Quadro graphics card accidentally (yes, you read that right). So, maybe it's time for me to invest in an anti-static bracelet and join the ranks of the "massive nerd" brigade.

The experiment had already gone awry when I realized editing the BIOS and the RX 570 didn't work. The graphics card wasn't outputting any kind of signal to MSI Afterburner, and it basically didn't recognize the graphics card anymore. With my options dwindling, I thought about contacting an AIB partner to see if they could create a special BIOS that would allow me to get the graphics card down to 0.1% power limit.

In a last-ditch effort, I decided to test my GTX 1080 with the lowest available power limit, which was actually lower than what I had hoped for (45%). To my surprise, it still managed to maintain above base frequency clock speeds, even at that lower power limit. The same thing happened with my RTX 2070 Super.

So, to answer the question of what lowering the power limit of a graphics card does... well, it ruins David's life, but also shows some interesting results. I may still reach out to an AIB partner to see if they can create that special BIOS for me. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to subscribe!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet me tell you today's video is a real doozy to make and it kind of blindsided me because it was a really simple idea that was supposed to be easy to execute and it just kind of led to me accidentally setting fire to my testbed this video is definitely going to trigger some Gary's Gary today's video idea was actually pitched by a discord member who said wouldn't it be interesting to see what effect power limit has on the performance of a graphics card and it would be really easy to test because you just run your favorite benchmark and gradually lower the power limit and see what effect it has on the performance now I was excited about this video idea cuz I thought it was simple enough that not even I could screw it up well joke's on me apparently but yeah how I went about it was I grabbed my trusty new gal axon TX 2070 super what the frames addition just not a quick side note I've been playing around with the RGB implementation on this graphics card and the software that comes with it has like a bunch of presets that you can customize over various RGB zones but all you need to know is one of those presets is called black hole so you can set the space graphics card in your PC through the black hole lighting effect honestly it doesn't even matter if it looks cool at this point you're only ever gonna have it on that setting because that's amazing yeah sorry I got a bit sidetracked there but anyway I decided to use my battlefield 5 in-game benchmark because it's my actual gameplay benchmark that's the most repeatable in my opinion so I ran three runs in a row to show just how repeatable it is at a hundred percent power limit on MSI Afterburner so that was kind of the baseline and then I took it up to 111 percent which is the highest that you can take and on this Galax card and yeah well the performance didn't change so then I started gradually lowering it 90 nothing changed 80% nothing changed 70 percent it started getting a bit weird the core of frequency started dropping as well but not significantly I couldn't feel a difference and then it's 60% it dropped quite a lot more so I was starting to get interesting but then we reached the limit of what the BIOS in the card allows I can't drop it below 58 percent on the galaxy card because why would anyone want to do that the thing is I didn't just want to stop here because that would be super lazy and this is just where the results are starting to get interesting I want to run a graphics card at like 0.1% power limit and see what that does you know just out of interest sake but unfortunately I couldn't do it with this graphics card and the BIOS is on most modern graphics cards are locked down so I can't really really change anything about it but then I remembered I've done some Polaris graphics card files editing before and that's quite easy to do when there's a bunch of software for that so I took out my rx 570 and saved its BIOS with GPU Z and then did some BIOS editing and in the process of doing that I actually had to use my rx 560 Koren graphics card as a display output so that I could flash a new bios onto the rx 570 and in that process my PC started acting really weirdly it would only output a graphic signal over the rx 560 no other graphics card even though the other graphics got worked in other test systems so I thought this was weird and I spent a couple hours playing around with it and then eventually I got to the point where I cleared the CMOS of the motherboard to see if that would do anything and then I switched it on and there was a puff of blue smoke and that lovely smell of burnt cabbage and yeah the motherboard died luckily the graphics card that was in the system which is my GTX 1080 is fine it survived it I'm not that sure about the 9700 K in there now I'm not a hundred percent sure what killed the test system but I think it may be my just blatant negligence around static in this house because it's a very dry period at the moment in Vancouver and I remember last year this time I set fire to a Quadro graphics card accidentally so yeah I may need to get an anti-static bracelet like some massive nerd luckily I was able to establish before the PC caught on fire that editing the BIOS and the rx 570 didn't work basically it meant that the graphics card wasn't outputting any kind of signals to MSI Afterburner and it kind of didn't recognize the graphics card anymore so this meant I was quickly running out of ideas for how to get this working I mean I did think of contacting like an AIB partner and asking them to make me a special BIOS which I may still do at some point I'll see how possible that is but I ended up just going through the graphics cards that I have and seeing which one is the lowest available power limit and it was actually my pallet GTX 1080 which can go down all the way to 45% that isn't really the 0.1% power limit I wanted but I guess we have to make do so then with the light at the end of the tunnel of the video idea that's been ruining the last 24 hours of my life I put my GTX 1080 in my editing PC which then straight up refused to run battlefield 5 because apparently I've logged into too many pcs with it so it can't handle that many new partners so that meant that I had to use assassin's creed's baked-in benchmark it's not an actual gameplay benchmark but it is very consistent I tested for consistency again and then weirdly enough lowering the power limit on the GTX 1080 didn't do much all the way down to 60% it basically had no effect on the performance at all and then I just said screw it let me go straight to 45% and see what happens and at that point it started dropping a lot the power usage of the card actually went down from about 140 watts to about 91 watts and the core clock also dropped quite a lot although it was still above the base frequency of the card which is quite interesting the same thing was the case with the RT X 2070 super as well we still maintained above base frequency clock speeds even with the lower power limit yeah so basically XP s 0 to answer the question of what does lowering the power limit of a graphics card do it ruins David's life that's kind of that's kind of the point there but but anyway um I may reach out to an add-in board card partner to see if they can make me a special bios that would allow me to get the graphics card down to 0.1% power limit I think that would be really interesting but if that doesn't happen then it doesn't happen yeah I really want to see now though I'm so interested in now so with that thank you very much for watching if you like the video subscribe to this channel and my gaming channel which I'll have linked in the description below check out my stream later today and social media and all of that and yeah thank you very much for watchinglet me tell you today's video is a real doozy to make and it kind of blindsided me because it was a really simple idea that was supposed to be easy to execute and it just kind of led to me accidentally setting fire to my testbed this video is definitely going to trigger some Gary's Gary today's video idea was actually pitched by a discord member who said wouldn't it be interesting to see what effect power limit has on the performance of a graphics card and it would be really easy to test because you just run your favorite benchmark and gradually lower the power limit and see what effect it has on the performance now I was excited about this video idea cuz I thought it was simple enough that not even I could screw it up well joke's on me apparently but yeah how I went about it was I grabbed my trusty new gal axon TX 2070 super what the frames addition just not a quick side note I've been playing around with the RGB implementation on this graphics card and the software that comes with it has like a bunch of presets that you can customize over various RGB zones but all you need to know is one of those presets is called black hole so you can set the space graphics card in your PC through the black hole lighting effect honestly it doesn't even matter if it looks cool at this point you're only ever gonna have it on that setting because that's amazing yeah sorry I got a bit sidetracked there but anyway I decided to use my battlefield 5 in-game benchmark because it's my actual gameplay benchmark that's the most repeatable in my opinion so I ran three runs in a row to show just how repeatable it is at a hundred percent power limit on MSI Afterburner so that was kind of the baseline and then I took it up to 111 percent which is the highest that you can take and on this Galax card and yeah well the performance didn't change so then I started gradually lowering it 90 nothing changed 80% nothing changed 70 percent it started getting a bit weird the core of frequency started dropping as well but not significantly I couldn't feel a difference and then it's 60% it dropped quite a lot more so I was starting to get interesting but then we reached the limit of what the BIOS in the card allows I can't drop it below 58 percent on the galaxy card because why would anyone want to do that the thing is I didn't just want to stop here because that would be super lazy and this is just where the results are starting to get interesting I want to run a graphics card at like 0.1% power limit and see what that does you know just out of interest sake but unfortunately I couldn't do it with this graphics card and the BIOS is on most modern graphics cards are locked down so I can't really really change anything about it but then I remembered I've done some Polaris graphics card files editing before and that's quite easy to do when there's a bunch of software for that so I took out my rx 570 and saved its BIOS with GPU Z and then did some BIOS editing and in the process of doing that I actually had to use my rx 560 Koren graphics card as a display output so that I could flash a new bios onto the rx 570 and in that process my PC started acting really weirdly it would only output a graphic signal over the rx 560 no other graphics card even though the other graphics got worked in other test systems so I thought this was weird and I spent a couple hours playing around with it and then eventually I got to the point where I cleared the CMOS of the motherboard to see if that would do anything and then I switched it on and there was a puff of blue smoke and that lovely smell of burnt cabbage and yeah the motherboard died luckily the graphics card that was in the system which is my GTX 1080 is fine it survived it I'm not that sure about the 9700 K in there now I'm not a hundred percent sure what killed the test system but I think it may be my just blatant negligence around static in this house because it's a very dry period at the moment in Vancouver and I remember last year this time I set fire to a Quadro graphics card accidentally so yeah I may need to get an anti-static bracelet like some massive nerd luckily I was able to establish before the PC caught on fire that editing the BIOS and the rx 570 didn't work basically it meant that the graphics card wasn't outputting any kind of signals to MSI Afterburner and it kind of didn't recognize the graphics card anymore so this meant I was quickly running out of ideas for how to get this working I mean I did think of contacting like an AIB partner and asking them to make me a special BIOS which I may still do at some point I'll see how possible that is but I ended up just going through the graphics cards that I have and seeing which one is the lowest available power limit and it was actually my pallet GTX 1080 which can go down all the way to 45% that isn't really the 0.1% power limit I wanted but I guess we have to make do so then with the light at the end of the tunnel of the video idea that's been ruining the last 24 hours of my life I put my GTX 1080 in my editing PC which then straight up refused to run battlefield 5 because apparently I've logged into too many pcs with it so it can't handle that many new partners so that meant that I had to use assassin's creed's baked-in benchmark it's not an actual gameplay benchmark but it is very consistent I tested for consistency again and then weirdly enough lowering the power limit on the GTX 1080 didn't do much all the way down to 60% it basically had no effect on the performance at all and then I just said screw it let me go straight to 45% and see what happens and at that point it started dropping a lot the power usage of the card actually went down from about 140 watts to about 91 watts and the core clock also dropped quite a lot although it was still above the base frequency of the card which is quite interesting the same thing was the case with the RT X 2070 super as well we still maintained above base frequency clock speeds even with the lower power limit yeah so basically XP s 0 to answer the question of what does lowering the power limit of a graphics card do it ruins David's life that's kind of that's kind of the point there but but anyway um I may reach out to an add-in board card partner to see if they can make me a special bios that would allow me to get the graphics card down to 0.1% power limit I think that would be really interesting but if that doesn't happen then it doesn't happen yeah I really want to see now though I'm so interested in now so with that thank you very much for watching if you like the video subscribe to this channel and my gaming channel which I'll have linked in the description below check out my stream later today and social media and all of that and yeah thank you very much for watching