How to Undervolt Your GPU: The Complete Guide (2026)

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-07-24 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

What undervolting actually does

Every graphics card leaves the factory with more voltage than it strictly needs. AMD and NVIDIA program a voltage-frequency curve that has to keep the worst chip of a given model stable, so most cards run higher voltage at a given clock than their particular silicon requires. Undervolting reclaims that margin: you tell the card to run the same clocks at a lower voltage.

The payoff comes in one of two forms, depending on your card:

• Lower heat, power, and noise at the same performance. Less voltage means less power turned into heat, so temperatures drop, fans spin slower, and the card is quieter — with the same frame rates.
• A few more frames. On a card that runs into its power limit under load (common on higher-end GPUs), lowering voltage frees up power budget, and the boost algorithm spends it on higher sustained clocks. That’s why undervolting can come out slightly faster, not slower.

It is one of the highest-value ten-minute tweaks in a PC, it costs nothing, and it’s fully reversible. This guide covers the method for both brands; for card-specific settings and measured results, it links down to our worked examples on a NVIDIA RTX 5080 and an AMD RX 9070 XT.

Before you start: baseline your card

You can’t tell an improvement from a placebo without a reference point. Run a demanding game or a benchmark for 10–15 minutes with a monitoring overlay (HWiNFO64, or AMD’s built-in metrics), and note four numbers under sustained load:

• Core clock (the sustained clock, not the momentary boost spike)
• Core voltage (VID / SVI)
• Power draw (board watts)
• Temperature — watch the hotspot / junction temperature, not just the edge temperature

Those are the numbers you’re trying to beat: same or higher clock, at lower power and temperature.

NVIDIA: the MSI Afterburner curve

NVIDIA cards are undervolted through MSI Afterburner’s voltage-frequency curve editor — the same tool works across every NVIDIA card, and on AMD cards too. The method:

1. Download and open MSI Afterburner and press Ctrl+F to open the curve editor — a graph of clock (MHz) against voltage (mV).
2. Note where your card runs at stock under load (from your baseline). Pick a lower voltage target — around 0.9V (900mV) is a widely used, safe starting point — and drag that point up to your stock sustained clock.
3. Flatten the curve to the right of your chosen point so the card can’t climb back to higher voltages, then click Apply.
4. Stress test (below). Once stable, save the profile and enable “apply at startup” so it loads every boot.

The idea is simple: you’re forcing the card to hit its normal clock at a lower voltage, and capping it there. For the full curve-editor walkthrough with measured before/after numbers on a current card, see the RTX 5080 undervolt guide.

AMD: the Adrenalin voltage offset

AMD makes this easier — everything is built into AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, so there’s no third-party tool. Rather than editing a curve point by point, you apply a negative voltage offset across the whole curve:

1. Press Alt+R to open Adrenalin, go to Performance → Tuning, and set the Tuning Control to Custom.
2. Enable GPU Tuning and lower the voltage with a negative offset — start conservative at around -40mV.
3. Optionally enable Power Tuning and trim the power limit (around -10% as a mild starting cut keeps performance closest to stock while lowering temperatures; deeper cuts trade performance for efficiency).
4. Apply, stress test, and step the offset deeper (toward -80 to -100mV) as stability allows.

The RX 9070 XT undervolt guide covers the Adrenalin controls, the community-converged offsets, and the efficiency-versus-performance trade in full. Older AMD cards and ASUS cards can also use GPU Tweak III, but the Adrenalin route works on any modern Radeon.

Test for stability (don’t skip this)

An undervolt that looks fine for five minutes and crashes an hour into a game is worse than no undervolt. Test it properly:

• Run a demanding, real game or a benchmark like 3DMark for at least 15 minutes — longer is better.
• Watch for crashes, driver timeouts (a black screen that recovers), or artifacts — these mean the voltage is too low for the clock you set. Raise the voltage (NVIDIA) or reduce the negative offset (AMD) slightly and retest.
• A common trap: an undervolt can pass a heavy all-core stress test but crash at lighter loads, so play normally for a few hours before you trust it.

When a setting survives real use, you’ve found your card’s stable point. Save it.

What to expect

Results vary by chip and by game — no two cards are identical — but the pattern is consistent: lower temperatures and power draw, quieter fans, and either the same or slightly better performance. On efficiency-focused cards the win is mostly thermal and acoustic; on power-limited, higher-end cards, undervolting can recover a few percent of performance on top. The power & cost calculator turns the watts you save into an annual dollar figure, and the PSU wattage calculator sizes a supply for the card’s real peak.

Card-specific guides and the CPU too

The steps above are the general method; the exact voltages and results depend on your specific card. For measured, step-by-step walkthroughs:

• RTX 5080 undervolt guide — the NVIDIA / MSI Afterburner curve, tuned for efficiency and 24/7 AI-inference use.
• RX 9070 XT undervolt guide — the AMD / Adrenalin offset, including why this power-limited card can gain FPS.

And to see where other people’s cards landed — the RTX 4090, 5090, RX 7900 XTX and more — the GPU undervolt settings database is an open, crowdsourced table of real settings and their measured results. Look up your card, or add yours by pull request.

And undervolting isn’t only for the GPU. Modern AMD CPUs undervolt through Curve Optimizer, which follows the same logic — lower voltage, freed headroom, cooler or faster. If you run a Ryzen X3D chip, the 9800X3D undervolt guide applies the same idea to the processor.

Pick your card, follow the method, and test it honestly. Ten minutes buys a cooler, quieter, and often slightly faster GPU, for free.

Sources

• The general method (MSI Afterburner voltage-frequency curve for NVIDIA; ~0.9V as a common safe starting target; AMD Adrenalin for Radeon cards) reflects the long-established, widely-documented consensus across community guides and vendor documentation, and is applied with measured, card-specific numbers in our linked RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT guides.
• How-To Geek — 8 Tips for Undervolting Your Gaming GPU (AMD Adrenalin method; per-game profiles) — verified live 2026-07-24
• MSI Afterburner is the free NVIDIA/AMD tuning utility used for the curve method; download it from MSI’s official Afterburner page.
• Card-specific measurements and community-consensus settings are cited in the linked RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT undervolt guides.