I didn’t know it was that easy to undervolt. Does that cause any issues?
1060 probably is the budget choice. Would like to push a little higher (and newer with more RAM) but may have to settle for those.
You can also undervolt the cpus as well, but you need old versions of xtu/throttle stop and slightly old bios because Intel got paranoid about some sort od security thing that will literally never happen to 99.9% of people
You can usually shave off 50mv just fine
I don’t know the motherboard in use, but it may be able to run something like an M40 and use the CPU video as a passthrough or display out. The M40 is right there with GTX 1660 and you can pick up a 12gb one for about 55$ or the 24GB for 120$.
Never seen it cause any issues. There’s a built in stress testing utility that can check for stability problems after applying the undervolt. Usually the default undervolt has a tiny affect on performance (we’re talking 2-3% at most) because the maximum achieved turbo clock is reduced slightly. However when I used it on a Vega 56 and a RX 5700 XT it didn’t drop performance at all but still dropped 25W off the load power draw. Manual undervolting and tuning will yield even better results on many cards.
One point worth to note with undervolting, this is the same as overclocking just in the opposite direction. It’s basically the silicon lottery in play here.
AMD / Intel / Nvidia design their chips according to a specific voltage, some samples will be able to undervolt up to 100-200mV, some will be able to undervolt only 20mV before performance and stability becomes a concern.
That said, undervolting will almost be guaranteed to not destroy your chip as opposed to overclocking. so you got nothing to lose from trying it out. Just be aware it will vary from chip to chip and each machine will require up to 6-8 hours of testing and tweaking to find the optimal stable undervolt for that specific machine.
I don’t have that kind of time personally, but YMMV. Not saying this to discourage, just letting you know what it takes. 
This is why I specifically mentioned the undervolt option AMD provides in their drivers. It’s a guaranteed range on all their cards. Because every modern video card runs clock domains on a dynamic VF curve, adjusting voltage adjusts frequency if that voltage is not sufficient. There’s no stability loss on modern hardware until the absolute extremes of undervolting (0.5v or so when the idle state of simply keeping the hardware active is no longer possible) as the consequence of dropping voltage by n steps yields a similar drop in frequency. This is why undervolting has become more of an active topic.
This isn’t true anymore. The driver will detect and test for you what the safe range is. It’s not 2013, we have software that does this now. Use the utility AMD provides.
Ah, this is good to know then. Thank you for correcting and bringing me up to speed, I usually never bother so all I got to go on is the occsional J2C video 
That isn’t just a plug and play solution is it? I’m not much of a tech despite being in this forum. lol
Yes, I understand that and thought the way you talk you just wanted a simple match rather than all this talk about under volting to reach a goal. Like others, I was just throwing out ideas that might work for you. The setup has become more simple now that many have worked with and used that setup, but it is not for everyone. There is a ton of info in [this thread]Gaming, on my Tesla, more likely than you think here on this forum.
edit: Gaming, on my Tesla, more likely than you think - #1828 by Abit_Wolf
The video quality was great in game but youtube seemed to reduce it badly once uploaded.
To be fair there’s a gulf in complexity between setting up GPU passthrough and clicking a single button in a control panel.
Why I said it’s not for everyone. Most people want PnP and not have to do anything.
I must say I know nothing about today’s AMD cards or voltage changes.
I haven’t messed with any since my mining days and those were 7850 and the likes.
Many moons ago. No contest.
came in yesterday where the two HP Z440 I ordered. They both look to be brand new never opened warehouse stock. Got them both up and running and played DooM Eternal @ 40 to 60 FPS with the NVIDIA Quadro K620 @ 1920 1080P. Will be upgrading the GPU on one soon to a GTX 1660 Sup. as display out w/ a Tesla M40. I could use it with the K620 as I have in the past and may test with it again. Other than the few smudges I put on them handling them they look to be new, not bad for 91$ shipped and tax included.
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6700k is pretty old and slow, so I think a faster GPU than something like a 1060 isn’t really worth it. You’ll have to accept lower settings and performance anyway.
570 8GB is also a good option. I wouldn’t recommend a 580 unless you’re comfortable underclocking, and newer AMD GPUs have limited PCIE bandwidth on older platforms, which may hurt their performance and therefore value.
I wouldn’t recommend anything above a 1660, for power reasons, as well as it’s just wasted performance.
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6700K was around the time people were pairing them with 1080’s and titans and a 1660 isn’t faster than either of them
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I agree, the 7700k (&6700k) was the last flagship quad-core and performs a little more than 2/3s of a 12100 in benchmarks with the ability to overclock and undervolt to close that gap. A decent 6-8GB card would be more that appropriate for that CPU. Especially for 1440p+
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It’s also the time when AMD started coming out with high corecount CPUs, and games started preferring to run on more cores, so it doesn’t really have the kind of headroom you would expect an i7 to come with.
For an old-hat budget-minded build for the younguns, with power limitations in mind, I don’t think high resolution or high refreshrate gaming is really a worthwhile investment. Better to stick to lower resolutions, lower settings, lower performance than waste more time and money trying to squeeze blood from the stone that is quad-core gaming.
Rather than trying to work around getting a new power supply, or potentially hazardous power adapters, it just makes more sense to work within what you have, and aim a little lower. I doubt the kids will mind lowering resolutions or playing at lower framerates, and cranking settings on a quadcore today is just asking for a bad time anyway.
Gotta pick the parts to fit the build, not just what you can technically do, but what makes sense to do.
My playtime with the HP Z440 didn’t go as planned. Turned out I didn’t have enough adapters to make the GTX 1660 and M40 work in this rig.
So I left in the K620 and put in a Tesla K40m instead. Actually, the card runs better than I expected on old drivers, no support in newer drivers so I had to settle for 463.15. I play games @ 1080P since that is the best monitor I have. Pretty happy with the results so far with playing DooM Eternal and Shatterline threw Steam.
Edit: DooM Eternal I tested in all settings from low to Ultra. High was the best setting for this card avg. 60+ FPS Ultra was in the 30’s Mid. 120 to 160 FPS. DooM is played from my SSD, and Shatterline is from Steam with an AVG. of 50+ FPS on high. I have wireless here in the shop from the house and not the best this far out. If there is any other info you’d like to ask I’ll try to answer.
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I Updated the second HP Z440 with a GTX 1660 just to see how well it did against the K40m. The below is my best run after tweaks other runs were very close to the above numbers. So 1660 is just a little better than the k40m, but with a better passthrough card than the K620, it might match 1660.
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A little late reply but wanted to tell that i tried 2x M40 in the HP Z440 and neither of those worked. I also must say that I have 4x M40 but two of those cards have modded vbios with Titan X and I think both I used had the mod bios on them that alllow them to be ran ina 16bit bar rather than in a 32bit bar with the normal stock vbios.
I placed in a Tesla P40 after testing the M40’s and it booted the very first time with the P40 and setup up perfect in win11 pro. So at this point if both I used did in deed have the mod bios I feel safe to say a stock bios should work for the M40. Problem I’m sure was that the display out card K620 and the mod bios of the M40 both were fighting for the same resorces in 16bit bar.
Edit: I’ve found that some motherboards handel the rescources hand off much better than others. I could disable the M40 in DM then re-enable it and it get asigned rescources, but still not work correctly. The rescorces has to be seperated at bios boot to actually work correctly once in the OS.
