Undervolting the RTX 3080 and the RTX3090

Performance when undervolting

RTX 3080

So what kind of results do we get when undervolting? Let’s start looking at the RTX 3080. The card I use, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC, already has a small overclock.

I settled for testing two settings: 825 mV/1815 MHz and 850 mV / 1860 MHz.

(3Dmark Timespy Extreme stresstest)

As expected the GPU temperature, the speed the fans need to spin and the power draw all gets reduced. At 825 mV the card draws almost 80 W less power. As the GPU temperature goes down there is less heat to cool off meaning the fans do not need to spin as fast which in turn means lower noise. Even at 850 mV/1860 MHz we see a big gain in all fronts.

So what avbout the performance in games. Well, as you can see we do loose some fps in some games but overall the loss is quite small and something I think many of us can live with considering what we gain when looking at temperatures, noise level and power consumption. The best thing to do of course is to save the setting to a slot in MSI Afterburner and use it in the games where it doesn’t affect the performance so much while letting other games run with the default setting.

RTX 3090

I undervolted the Gigabyte RTX 3090 Eagle OC. This card also has a minor overclock from the factory.

The settings I selected were 800 mV, 1710 Mhz.

(Bright Memory: Infinite Ray Tracing Benchmark)

The savings in power consumption is not as high here on the RTX 3080 but we do get lower temperatures and lower fan speed.

The performance loss is very small and while the card already is silent and runs pretty cool I guess it is nice to reduce that even more.

Summary

Undervolting is perfect if you want to reduce the power consumption, GPU temperature and possibly noise from your card without loosing to much performance. In fact, if you are bold you can start playing around with increasing the frequency and using the reduced temperature to overclock the card even higher. An undervolt/overclock-strategy which actually can bring you even more performance.

Overall though I think the main draw will be to help your card run cooler and quieter.

Remember that you take full responsibility when messing with your card. There shouldn’t be any risk for damage to your card but just be aware of any risk regardless how minor it is. Also remember that just because we could undervolt our cards to a certain setting does not mean your card will work the same. It might be even better or need a bit higher voltage.