Real achievable clock rates and overclocking
The clock rates of the achievable boost again rely on different boost steps for clearly defined temperature ranges. Thus, the card still reached 2805 MHz at below 50 °C, whereas you should end up with 2760 MHz or slightly above in reality if the card has to work fully warmed up in a good case. Thus, water cooling creates additional clock speeds during boost if the coolant and cooling block can keep the GPU temperature in these low ranges. Otherwise, you will probably have to release a bit more power, which is actually unnecessary.
Overclocking and increasing the power limit is a thing of its own, but I am also reluctant to destroy the excellent efficiency. You still get about 7 to 10% more performance in ultra HD at a full 355 watts power limit (real TBP in the game up to about 340 watts) at clock rates just above 3.1 GHz until the voltage limitation brutally kicks in. The variances get slightly better if you don’t increase the beat excessively, but these are things that are better left out. The V/F curve basically ends at the area where you can locate the 320 watts, everything beyond that is pure luck in the GPU lottery.
Temperatures in the housing
The differences are not as big as feared if you use a decent case. Because in the end, the card does not convert much more waste heat than a GeForce RTX 3080 FE, usually even much less. If you then add the fat cooler, you can certainly live much more relaxed here. If you close the panel, the GPU temperature (edge) increases by 1 to 2 Kelvin, and the hotspot increases by up to 4 Kelvin. This is comparatively little, but can cost at least one boost step. Nevertheless, the temperatures are in a class of their own, despite the waste heat.
Fan curve and operating noise (“volume”)
Let’s now turn to what is automatically produced when the waste heat is removed: various fan noises. With an average fan speed of around 1200 to 1260 rpm, the card is really quiet, although not whisper quiet. But we can also see here from the two curves that the two fans rotate at different speeds so that no audible intermodulations occur. You can also see the short start-up pulse, which is to ensure that the fans actually start. Better safe than sorry, so don’t be alarmed.
The measurements in the measuring chamber are, as always, a bit tricky, because you can’t measure anything through the closed side window. Therefore, I manually set the fans to exactly the speed measured above (NVIDIA GPUMon) and then left the panel off. During the measurements, I briefly unplugged the AiO fans because the CPU was idle anyway. The distance was 50 cm perpendicular to the top of the card (direction 12VHPWR socket).
The measured 35.1 dB(A) are good and miles below those of earlier Founders Editions. This is even really decent for a 300 watt card in an actually closed configuration. If you close the side panel, the sound pressure level drops to around 32 to 33 dB(A), which almost halves the operating noise. Even the fans of the AiO are much more dominant during processor load.
If there is anything to criticize, it is again the slightly out-of-round fan above the GPU, although you can also measure a slightly lower motor noise at around 180 Hz here. The actual fan noise, which occurs when the air is torn off and at the cooling fins, is rather marginal. Let’s put it this way: it’s by far the quietest Founders Edition in recent years, but still a bit louder than some (much heavier) AIC cards. That is already worth a positive mention.
- 1 - Introduction, technical data and technology
- 2 - Test system and the igor'sLAB MIFCOM-PC
- 3 - Teardown: PCB, components and cooler
- 4 - Gaming performance WQHD (2560 x 1440 Pixels)
- 5 - Gaming performance UHD (3840 x 2160 Pixels)
- 6 - Gaming performance UHD + DLSS/FSR/XeSS (3840 x 2160 Pixels)
- 7 - DLSS 3.0 and the longest benchmark bars
- 8 - NVIDIA Reflex and latencies
- 9 - Workstation performance
- 10 - Power consumption, load levels and standards
- 11 - Transients and PSU recommendation
- 12 - Temperatures, clock rates, OC, fans and noise
- 13 - Summary and conclusion
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