ASUS Astral RTX 5090 OC edition Settings OC/UV

[Silent-Guardia]

@Silent_Scone + anyone’s opinion

Don’t want to get into the back and forth into this part as it isn’t the main emphasis, but many people say use Afterburner in terms of software, and then some say GPU tweak III because it’s an ASUS card. Which would you choose and why?

Now, my highest scores are 41941 in Port Royal 3Dmark Benchtest. I believe I’m completely maxed out from going anything further than this. My real world practicality is to obviously play video games without stability issues but also at best performance. I do worry cranking my settings will cause the power cables to melt or mess up the cards thermal paste decreasing my settings overtime.

In all my bench tests I never exceeded 70 Celsius. I’m always around 48- 61 on average based on my setting. Being new to Overclocking and undervolting, some people prefer to increase longevity while getting slightly better than stock default settings vs max performance the card can offer.   

What I did to get the score above was a Power limit at 100%, 3000MHZ memory, + 330 core. I don’t recall but I think I may set the curve to exceed 3000 and set it at 3262. But here is what I don’t get, when playing with afterburner, when messing with memory clock, the slider I know maxes to 3000, but when running a game over benchmarks, I see the game achieve 3262 MHZ with about 300 or slightly more Watts at a lower GPU load then what Port Royal would do. Does this mean that I should set my curve to 3262? Eventually I did get my first couple crashes after few games of gameplay. But no crashes in Port Royal. So confused how a full load doesn’t crash but a game does over time. 

Other info: I ran my with my fans blasted to 100% on the GPU only in my pc. Other fans are running at 55% speed and I have a fractal torrent pc case. 

Now others reported they do 3000 with 350 or 300 with no curve. Some say 2900 and set the curve at .90.

I know this is all trial and error but error, but trying things out and not understanding what my values are when looking at a monitor reader could help more. 

In the end, Overclock best settings vs undervolt for max cap of 395 out 400 FPS/HZ monitor when playing games…What is your guys choice and settings?

[st3inerd]

The short answer is YMMV.  I use afterburner simply because I am familiar with the interface, it really matters not.  the reason you can tweak it to hold up in Port Royal is beacause it is a synthetic bechmark and is a fixed situation or known event. so you can tweak to your peak in that and it will run fine for that benchmark.  But games are a different animal, the GPU loads and memory usage is more fluid and will take your board through a wide range of differing loads.  hence your tweak that worked in Port Royal is solid there but maybe not in your favorite game.  if you run into that just back off on your care boost until your game becomes stable.  People that are chasing the highest benchmark numbers typically are not daily driving at those settings, they do it because its fun and a challenge to see how far you can push your card.  If you run the benchmark and are falling right around the average then you know your card is performing as advertized.  I use afterburner to undervolt then boost clocks back to factory to keep my temps down.  But then I sometimes play with OC to see how good my cards will do on air.   It's all good and there are plenty of guides out there if you do a few searches to show you how to tweak it.  Just remember if it works in a benchmark it won't necessarily work in your game and everyones card is different so even if we both have astral 5090's your might be more cherry then mine so no guarantee that our settings will work for each other.

[thismarkjohnson]

Both Afterburner and GPU Tweak III work fine — Afterburner has better control and monitoring, while GPU Tweak integrates smoother with ASUS cards. Since stability matters, try undervolting slightly instead of pushing clocks; it’ll keep temps low and performance steady without risking crashes.

[Silent_Scone]

Hi @Silent-Guardia 

As others have stated, software comes down to preference. GPUT3 has alerts for amperage; however, it's now also possible to set these up in HWi64. In my opinion, undervolting the Astral makes far more sense than overclocking from a long-term perspective. There is a substantial power saving to be made whilst losing next to no performance. In some instances, even gaining some [over OC Mode].

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