Except that Wattman is not only used for overclocking.
It's also meant for undervolting - which is what I'm primarily interested
in.
Laptop manufacturers often mess up the cooling, resulting in thermal
throttling at STOCK settings, and AMD admitted themselves they increased
the voltages to all of their GPU's from factory to improve yields.
Undervolting the GPU would result in much lower power expenditure and lower
temperatures.
Take my Ryzen 1700 CPU in the laptop for example.
It's original voltage was set to too high... 1.1875V at 3GhZ across all
cores.
I can easily undervolt the CPU to 1.05V and overclock it to 3.3 GhZ
(increasing performance by 10% and radically dropping power consumption and
heat emissions - my CPU is actually cooler by 10 degrees Celsius as a
result and 10% FASTER).
Point being, laptops can easily run overclocked and undervolted without
damaging anyhing... but it depends on the individual system.
For the GPU, I'm not interested in overclocking it as it has plenty of
juice and that would only bring minimal improvements even if it were done.
I want to undervolt the RX 580 on the core and VRAM to radically drop power
consumption.
I was already able to use MSI Afterburner to drop the core voltage by -93mV
stable across all workloads and it dropped my temperatures from 88 degrees
Celsius to 75 degrees Celsius at maximum load - and it also resulted in
much quieter fans.
I want wattman so I can undervolt the GPU VRAM in addition to the core
undervolt and see if I can drop power consumption further.
