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Comment by pentae | Hacker News Reader

It certainly makes building Mini ITX a lot more interesting when you're trying to get the sweet spot for performance to thermals/noise ratio.

I did a nCase M1 build recently and my objective for the build was small as possible, quiet as possible, and as powerful as possible in that order. I still ended up with a pretty powerful machine by going with an i3-12100 instead of an i5/i7 which uses much less power and puts out less heat. The RTX 3080 reference card was the biggest card that could fit into the case which I undervolted.

A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise. I don't know why Nvidia doesn't just have a one click button for people.

nCase unfortunately have discontinued this case based on 'market factors' which I suspect means that they don't anticipate things to be getting smaller and cooler any time soon.

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>A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise

Bah, this is brilliant. I just upgraded a 1070 to a 3070 and am flabbergasted at how much heat it dumps into my room. One of the reasons I did not go with the 3080 was the ~100 watt lower draw.

Do you know of any good tooling to assess the impact of undervolting or is it a manual guess-and-check process?

I just built a Ryzen 5600G system (without a discrete video card atm) and you can set either temperature or power consumption limits in the BIOS and it will underclock itself (actually turbo boost less) until it obeys your limits.

Perhaps I'll wait with the video card until they give me the option to do the same there...

Trial and error. You need to dial in the right point on the voltage/clock frequency curve for your workloads, AKA "just play some games and look at the results." Just use whatever your overclocking software for your motherboard is, and modify the default curve it has. I use MSI Afterburner and just set a flat clock frequency (plateau) at a certain voltage level to undervolt. I think for NVidia GPUs there's a way to modify the curve with the default tooling, but third party tools like Afterburner can also do it.

You can get great results pretty fast this way. My Mini-ITX build is about as thermally compact as possible given the parts (3080+Ryzen 5600X, NZXT H1), and I'm pushing my PSU to the absolute limits in the stock settings, so undervolting is important for safe power margins since the 3080 can reach ~360W in my testing. I think 30 minutes of tweaking got me something like a +80W power drop for only 10% FPS in Read Dead Redemption 2 @ 4k60fps; I never breach 300W now which is within my personal safety margins, and can native 4k everything.

Some software like Afterburner have "Overclock Scanner" tools that will run benchmarks and repeatedly try to dial these settings in for you, but it really is easier to just modify the curve manually and test your specific workloads.

i use prime95 for cpus and msi kombustor for gpus. if they can run for a while without errors i keep my settings, otherwise i increase power/voltage and try again

prime95 isn't a very good test anymore. With the changeover from blend to smallfft, it doesn't test the frontend or the memory controller or any of the other parts of the CPU very well anymore, it loads the kernel into instruction cache once and then it just slams the AVX units as hard as it can.

so not only does this not test the rest of the cpu at all - meaning you can run into problems with other parts of the CPU that aren't stable at those frequencies, because they're not being tested because it's only running the AVX units - but it also doesn't test frequency/power state changes at all, so you can run into situations where as soon as you close prime95 and it drops to a lower p-state, it'll crash.

gpus have run into similar things with furmark and kombuster and other power-virus tests... actually the GPUs themselves will detect when they're running and throttle down, so they no longer even do the thing they're supposed to, but, gpus also change power/frequency states under real-world workloads, just like CPUs, and they don't under furmark/kombuster. this actually caused a crisis at the ampere launch... all the testing had been done with a "pre-release bios" that only allowed these sorts of power/thermal testing, and it turned out that while the chips might be stable at max p-state, they weren't stable when they shifted back to a lower p-state, or from a lower p-state back to maximum. That was the whole "POSCAP vs MLCC" thing.

prime95 and furmark were very very popular 10 years ago but that's where they belong, they don't do the job anymore these days.

Make sure to also cap your FPS or use Vsync. No point pumping out 100fps when you have only a 60hz TV, etc.

This is the correct answer to tackle power draw. Use Vsync/Adaptive Sync for fixed refresh monitors, or FreeSync/GSync for variable refresh monitors.

For variable refresh rate monitors, it's best to use framerate limiters as well: either in-game or in the Nvidia control panel. Set the cap at least a few fps lower than your monitor's max refresh rate. Even better, aim for 90-100 fps cap, beyond which diminishing returns kick in and power bills continue to creep up.

Just use MSI Afterburner and do some tests. I also usually setup a fan curve where the fan always runs faster than default to keep the temps lower.

>> my objective for the build was small as possible, quiet as possible, and as powerful as possible in that order.

With the same priorities and a deemphasis on graphics, I present to you the Mellori-ITX: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX

Uses the CPU fan as a case fan. By protruding through the top we get a lower profile than is possible with any other ITX case (well the standoffs can be cut down but that has not be optimized).

My next build will be an upgrade of the same design but with a Zen 4 or 5 chip with 8 or 16 cores depending what fits in the power constraints of the Pico-PSU. It will be a while though because that system is still more than enough for everything I do with it.

Mini ITX is also insanely more expensive than building a regula tower. Sure, if you're only putting the most expensive CPU and GPU in it then probably it doesn't matter to you but for value oriented builds, miniITX case, Mobo, PSU and cooler add up a lot.

You can get a great cheap ITX cases these days for about $50 (Cougar), A 650w SFX Power Supply for about $70 (Evga), ITX motherboards start at $110... then just make sure you choose a sensible CPU/GPU from there based on your power supply. And if you're using entry level cpu/gpu then you don't need to go crazy with cooling either.

Certainly not much more expensive than a regular mATX build imho.

I have an M1 gaming build where I prioritized efficiency; 5800X3D and RX 6600 with a 450W PSU.

I also have a mini-ITX Lone L5 build with an i3-12100 and no GPU with a 192W PSU. (Effectively - PSU is technically a bit more, but the AC/DC adapter is only 192W.)

What games can you play on an M1?

I think this is the nCaae M1, a computer chassis and case, not the Apple M1.

> A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise. I don't know why Nvidia doesn't just have a one click button for people.

Yeah, I did exactly that with my 3080. Dropped ~50W depending on the game and I was able to keep the same clock speeds.

Undervolting actually let me over clock my 3070 higher, presumably due to extra thermal headroom? I noticed two peaks in the timespy results and undrrvolting moved me between them, so this must be pretty well known.

They probably work on a successor. In the meantime, the DAN Cases A4-H2O or the FormD T1 are worthy replacements.

Yeah undervolting is always worth it.

You can also limit your i7 power usage, so no need to go for an i3 if you have the money.

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