Overclocking NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition

The FPS Review may receive a commission if you purchase something after clicking a link in this article.

Conclusion

The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is NVIDIA’s replacement for the GeForce RTX 4080, setting the GeForce RTX 4080 to a new price point of $999. Utilizing the full AD103 die specs, it practically performs the same as the GeForce RTX 4080 in gaming. However, we have found that the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER does use slightly less power and is more efficient, than the GeForce RTX 4080 while still providing 2-3% more performance in some situations.

Overclocking Summary

In our overclocking review of the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, we took the Founders Edition and overclocked it as high as we could on the core and memory frequency. We found that the Power could be increased by 10%, giving us a bit more control, and we had plenty of headroom for the GPU frequency and memory frequency. The default boost clock on the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition is 2550MHz and thanks to NVIDIA GPU Boost the Founders Edition actually dynamically clocks up to 2730MHz while gaming, a 7% increase in clock speed before even overclocking.

Starting from that boost clock of 2730MHz, we were able to push it to 2955MHz while gaming, which is another 8% clock speed gain. This was all possible without upping the Voltage or changing the fan speed. While we did peak at 3GHz briefly, without being able to increase the Voltage, we had to keep the frequency about 50MHz below that. We were also able to increase the memory frequency from 23Gbps up to 24.5Gbps, which is very fast for memory clocks on this series. We noticed that the power and temperature did not increase much, power only increased by 5% bringing it up to the level of the GeForce RTX 4080 in power demand.

With the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER overclocked, we experienced an average of 6% gain in gaming performance. There were some games and scenarios that were a little less, and some a little more, but generally around a 6-7% performance gain. This did help performance in some games at 4K to be more playable. Where we really noticed a difference was in some tough situations where Ray Tracing was demanding at 4K, when combined with DLSS Upscaling the overclock actually made a difference.

In our original testing, the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER had a similar performance to the GeForce RTX 4080. When we overclock the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER it is now generally 6-7% above the GeForce RTX 4080 in performance. When we compare the overclocked performance to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, we now find that the overclocked GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER overtakes the Radeon RX 7900 XTX more often than not now, it was the difference in making it perform better in several games. However, there are some games that still have big leads on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, like Horizon Forbidden West and Returnal.

Final Points

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER has proven to be a very efficient video card, and for the power demands, very performant. We were impressed with how it compares to the GeForce RTX 4080 in terms of power demand and were very impressed when we overclocked it. It met the same power as the GeForce RTX 4080, yet provided 6-7% more performance, at the same power. 

It is a shame that it didn’t have this performance advantage by default, however, we feel this 6-7% gain over the GeForce RTX 4080 is what it should have been out of the box. Thankfully, however, it can be achieved through manual overclocking, and it won’t cause the power demand to skyrocket. If you are in the market for a GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, a factory overclocked part, or manual overclocking, may be appealing, as long as the price isn’t excessive.

Join the discussion in our forums...

Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

Recent News