NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Review: Between Value and Decadence - When Price is Not Everything | Page 17

Temperatures and Boost Cycle

The card will boot if it is cool enough and the GPU load does not exceed 20% up to 1950 MHz. However, this is a kind of fair-weather boost, which in my very extremely demanding test game then collapses as the temperature rises from 1850 MHz to about 1740 MHz. Thus, it is only 45 MHz above what NVIDIA officially states for the boost. You can easily overclock the memory up to almost 21 Gb/s, whereby the GDDR6X memory inside gets up to 100 degrees hot (games approx. 96°C). That is less than with the RTX 3080 FE, because the memory modules are cooled here by the Backplate.

The GPU could not even be overclocked stably more than 200 MHz, but after warming up, this resulted in about 105 MHz more clock. Costs and benefits? Dog-tail principle, because more waste heat causes the boost cycle to drop again. So it’s a bit senseless and the whole map screams for water cooling!

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 leave the backplate on, because it also cools the voltage converters AND the memory this time. If you now let the Witcher 3 run free and get some air, everything heats up properly but still in a mannerly way. The delta of the heatpipes to the GPU diode is only 11 to 12 degrees at the outlet in front of the fans, which is a good value. The removal of the waste heat therefore works.