Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti - Ampere becomes even smaller and still shows its claws | Page 11

Temperatures and Boost Cycle

The card boosts when it’s cool enough and the GPU load doesn’t exceed 20% except for a little more than 2 GHz. However, this is a kind of fair weather boost, which in my very extremely demanding test game collapses as the temperature rises from 1935 MHz to about 1860 MHz. But this is still well above what NVIDIA officially states for the boost. You can still overclock the memory a bit, whereby the GDDR6 memory inside gets about 90 °C (games about 88 °C) warm. This is not little, but still harmless. In spite of heat conductive pads under the VRM. It would have been better to cool the storage tank here.

The GPU, like the GeForce RTX 3070, couldn’t even be stably overclocked by more than 200 MHz, which, however, ended up in about 105 MHz more clock rate after warming up. Costs and benefits? Dog-tail principle, because more waste heat causes the boost cycle to drop again. Here one will have to hope for the GPU lotto and the best possible manual voltage adjustment in the Curve Editor. Depending on chip quality.

Let us now come to the recording with the high-resolution infrared camera. The PI640 from Optris has a true 640 x 480 pixel bolometer and records at up to 30 FPS. I use here the normal lens and calibrated foil with a known transmittance so that I can de facto look inside the closed housing. I remove the backplate because this time it does not cool the voltage converters directly and the memory. If you now let the Witcher 3 run free and some air, everything heats up properly but still in a mannerly way. The underside of the VRM is warm at up to 78 °C, but not hot. The current backplate solution yields only about 2 to 3 degrees less here on the right side, and even less with the memory VRM on the left.