Breaking News

Undervolting the RTX 3080 and the RTX3090

Jump to section

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.

Default

850 mV, 1860 MHz

825 mV / 1805 MHz

GPU Temp

74 C

68 C

67 C

Fan speed

86 %

79 %

78 %

Board Power Draw

339 - 355 W

277 - 291 W

270 - 278 W

(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.

Default

850 mV, 1860 Mhz

825 mV / 1805 MHz

3Dmark Timespy

14905 / 17203

14712 / 16839

14485 / 16519

3Dmark Timespy Extreme

7515 / 8658

7512

7415 / 8510

3Dmark Port Royal

11043

10828

10630

Forza Horizon 4 1440p

116

115

113

Forza Horizon 4 4K

91

89

87

The Divison, 1440p

122

118

118

The Division, 4K

71

72

60

Wolfenstein Youngbloods, 1440p

97 / 67
Average/min

97 / 62

96 / 35

Wolfenstein Youngbloods, 4K

75 / 47
Average/min

76 / 47

74 / 48

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.

Default

800 mV, 1710 Mhz

GPU Temp

72 C

68 C

Fan speed

82 %

78 %

Board Power Draw

340 - 350 W

306 - 332 W

(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.

Default

800 mV, 1710 Mhz

3Dmark Timespy

15822 / 18545

15608 / 18357

3Dmark Port Royal

12301

12146

Wolfenstein Youngbloods, 1440p

97 / 64
Average/min

96 / 64

Wolfenstein Youngbloods, 4K

84 / 54
Average/min

82 / 53

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. 

Jump to section

Check Also

Fifine Ampligame A6T

Introduction Much like the webcam, the USB microphone has become a rather indispensable tool in …

Cooler Master Hyper 622 Halo

Introduction The liquid cooling is the go to cooler for the PC enthusiasts who want …

2 comments

  1. Hi

    i’ve undervolted my Strix 3090 to 0.850 @ 1905 but i find my temps quite hot even with it

    while playing some games like days gone, i have around 70c on core and 86c on memory

    I game at 3840×1600, i’ve also put some heatsink and a fan on the backplate to cool vrm but not sure if it does something to be honest

    I don’t want to go on water for now or change thermal pads for warranty issues

    Are thos ok temps for this gpu? I’m quite concerned by temps

    If i go lower like 1850 for 0.8 will I lose a lot of performances?

  2. Actually it’s quite good temps for this type of card. So just relax 🙂

Leave a Reply

instagram default popup image round
Follow Me
502k 100k 3 month ago
Share