Overclocking the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING
How do you overclock a EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING video card?
Before we begin to overclock, we need to find out the real-world in-game GPU frequency the video card is operating at by default. That way we can find what frequency we are overclocking from and how much gain we get in overclocking. Keep in mind that NVIDIA GPU Boost already adjusts the GPU frequency dynamically to utilize most of the potential that is there. This means it will already clock the GPU frequency well above the quoted Boost Clock even without overclocking.
Default Clock
The base clock on this video card is 1260MHz, which isn’t very helpful. More importantly, it is the GPU Boost Clock makes the difference and it is set at 1800MHz on the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING. This is 90MHz higher than the NVIDIA listed stock GPU Boost of 1710MHz.
The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING settled in around 1905MHzwith the occasional bump up to 1920MHz during testing and maintained a temperature of 72.3 degrees Celsius. Compared to the 10GB Founders Edition that averaged 1820MHz, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING declares victory over the Founders Edition by about 85MHz. Memory in both the 10GB Founders Edition and the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING is set to 19GHz using GDDR6X memory.
Highest Stable Overclock
To dial in the maximum overclock for the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB FTW3 ULTRA GAMING, we used EVGA’s Precision X1 software that makes lots of knobs to turn and levers to pull available for tuning enjoyment.
We started by maxing out the Power Target at 113% and boosted the GPU Temp Target up from 83C to 91C. We then cranked the fans up to 100%. There was not a knob present for modifying voltage, however, given the low power budgets on the RTX 30 Series that we have seen so far, adding voltage has not been necessary as it only increases power consumption and reduces how far GPU Boost will push the core clock speed up.
With the power matters settled, we started by pushing the core clock up as high as it could go without touching the memory side of the equation. We were able to pick up an extra 150 MHz on the slider offset before we started crashing.
Next up, we set the core back to stock and boosted the memory to see how far we could take it. It appeared to be happiest at +1600MHz (3200MHz effective). This is a boost to 22.2GHz GDDR 6X over the stock of 19GHz GDDR6X.
Putting it all together, we first tried our max individual clocks together to see how it worked. This gave us a final stable overclock of 1410MHz core clock, 1950MHz boost clock and 22.2GHz memory clock.
Comparing the sustained GPU frequency to the stock frequency, we see that the observed overclocked frequency averaged out to 2115MHz. This is an 11% increase over the stock clocks and a 16.2% boost over the stock Founders Edition performance. The memory at 22.2GHz is 16.8% faster than the stock clock as well.
