Overclocking the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING
How do you overclock an EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 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 1360MHz, which isn’t very helpful. More importantly, it is the GPU Boost Clock that makes the difference and it is set at 1800MHz on the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING. This is 135MHz higher than the NVIDIA listed stock GPU Boost of 1665MHz.
The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING settled in between 1860MHz and 1875MHz during testing and maintained a temperature of 78.3 degrees Celsius. Compared to the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition which averaged 1804MHz, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING declares victory over the Founders Edition by about 56-71MHz. Memory in both the 12GB Founders Edition and the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 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 Ti 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 111% 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 160 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 +1400MHz (2800MHz effective). This is a boost to 21.8GHz 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 1525MHz core clock, 1960MHz boost clock, and 21.8GHz memory clock.
Comparing the sustained GPU frequency to the stock frequency, we see that the observed overclocked frequency bounced between 2040 and 2055MHz. This is an 9.7% increase over the stock clocks and a 13% boost over the stock Founders Edition performance. The memory at 21.8GHz is 14.7% faster than the stock clock as well.
