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Looking for gerbil thoughts. Would I be better off with a 1060 6gb or a 580 8gb, with the intention to undervolt them for reduced heat and power draw?

I don't know, but by default 1060 seems more efficient:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2299?vs=2301

What is your intended use? Do you have strict limitations on power consumption for some reason?

Might want to look at GTX1660 and the upcoming (July 7) AMD Navi GPUs, since the GTX1060 and RX580 are >2.5 years old at this point.

I posted an AMD Polaris Undervolting Guide here. I was able to pull about 30W out of my Factory-1305MHz RX480 without sacrificing any clockspeed. That pretty much brings it within striking distance of an untouched GTX1060 in power draw. Most results I've seen on RX570/RX580s are about the same.

Nvidia GPUs are a bit different since GPU Boost3.0 typically overclocks past the advertised boost clock speed anyway. I haven't looked too hard, but you'd need to find someone who's keeping an eye on that ACTUAL boost clock while undervolting. It all depends on how sophisticated GPU Boost3.0 actually is (aka, how conservative it's being when it adds voltage to get higher clocks while staying under the thermal limit). The GTX1060 starts at a lower power draw than an RX580, so like I said above, a zero gain for a GTX1060 tweak is a break even on power draw.

I don't have much experience with Afterburner or other 3rd party apps for tweaking Nvidia GPUs, but I do like AMD's built-in WattMan utility that runs within the driver already. I know the default Afterburner is simply a voltage/frequency offset [from max speed assumedly], whereas WattMan directly exposes all 7 of the performance states' Frequency and Voltage for an easy to understand result.

At this point, I'd get a used 580 with a good cooler. AMD is usually aggressive with the GPU voltage which means a lot of chips can be downvolted with no unwanted side effects.
It also depends which games you intend to play since there's a bunch of titles that can sway you either way.

DPete27 wrote:

I don't have much experience with Afterburner or other 3rd party apps for tweaking Nvidia GPUs, but I do like AMD's built-in WattMan utility that runs within the driver already. I know the default Afterburner is simply a voltage/frequency offset [from max speed assumedly], whereas WattMan directly exposes all 7 of the performance states' Frequency and Voltage for an easy to understand result.

It is easier to undervolt in wattman than using afterburner on Nvidia.

For starters, you can't specify a negative voltage offset in afterburner for Nvidia chips. However, you can undervolt in 2 ways:

1. Set a power limit under 100%. This is the easiest method but not very precise.

2. Create a custom clock/voltage curve in afterburner. This one's somewhat complicated and not very intuitive, but you can get some really good results from it (I cut about 15- 20W from my 1080 Max q, and bear in mind this was already a tuned mobile chip to start with).

But as Dpete says, you should wait for the newer chips. Navi especially sounds pretty promising in this space.

Voldenuit wrote:

DPete27 wrote:

I don't have much experience with Afterburner or other 3rd party apps for tweaking Nvidia GPUs, but I do like AMD's built-in WattMan utility that runs within the driver already. I know the default Afterburner is simply a voltage/frequency offset [from max speed assumedly], whereas WattMan directly exposes all 7 of the performance states' Frequency and Voltage for an easy to understand result.

It is easier to undervolt in wattman than using afterburner on Nvidia.

For starters, you can't specify a negative voltage offset in afterburner for Nvidia chips. However, you can undervolt in 2 ways:

1. Set a power limit under 100%. This is the easiest method but not very precise.

2. Create a custom clock/voltage curve in afterburner. This one's somewhat complicated and not very intuitive, but you can get some really good results from it (I cut about 15- 20W from my 1080 Max q, and bear in mind this was already a tuned mobile chip to start with).

But as Dpete says, you should wait for the newer chips. Navi especially sounds pretty promising in this space.

I'm lazy, I just change the power limit. It's effective and doesn't require changing voltage curves. I saved significant power by just setting my gtx 1080 ti to an 85 percent power limit.

thecoldanddarkone wrote:

I'm lazy, I just change the power limit. It's effective and doesn't require changing voltage curves. I saved significant power by just setting my gtx 1080 ti to an 85 percent power limit.

Have you measured what that does to clockspeeds? Particularly actual boost clock? Just curious.

Nothing wrong with keeping things on auto. Many/most people do that. With the internet, not having the knowledge to overclock/undervolt/etc isn't an excuse. Heck, you can find a rough OC/undervolt profile for most CPUs and GPUs these days that would get you within a few percent of your chip's limit anyway with a simple Google search. The big thing is having/spending the time to stability test. I think that's where most people draw the line.

Undervolting an AMD card is easier than undervolting an Nvidia card, from a software perspective.

IMO, an undervolted RX580 will not be any cooler and quieter than an undervolted 1060. The 580 will end up at around 110W once you drop voltages to 975mv and clocks to 1250MHz. The 1060 is harder to predict but around 85W seems reasonable.

For temperatures and noise levels, the quality of the cooler matters more than the power draw of the card, and you will probably find that for the same price, a 180W cooler on an RX580 produces better results when cooling a 110W undervolted load than the 120W cooler on a 1060 when cooling an 85W undervolted load. On the other hand, those results will be skewed if your case has minimal airflow, giving the advantage back to the GPU with the absolute lowest power draw.

I just undervolted a 1660 Ti for the first time last night. It's a laptop model, so I don't know how binned those things are. Anyway, I got it from 1.050v for 1.8 GHz down to 0.925 for the same max speed. No overclocking, just a more aggressive ramp up to the same max at a lower voltage. Not sure about what it did to power draw but it resulted in lower fan speeds while gaming. If someone can tell me how to look, I will, but I was helping a buddy out and it's at his house now...might take a while.

I got in an internet argument with a fella on Toms and had to buy/use a Kill-a-Watt meter to verify that GPUz reports a fairly accurate result of GPU power draw. I'm sure other software using those same handles would report the same info.

Did you use Afterburner for the laptop GPU?

I'd go with the 580, myself. 1060 is efficient to start with so there's more practical upside on the AMD side.