Overclocking MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC
To overclock the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC video card, MSI sent us over a new Beta version of MSI Afterburner which supports GeForce RTX 50-Series GPUs. This software allowed us to increase the Power Limit, the GPU Voltage, GPU frequency, and memory frequency. In addition, we could enable manual fan control, and even individualize fan speeds, but we kept them synced for our testing. In fact, we even managed to just keep them on “Auto” due to the incredible cooling efficiency of this video card.
In the screenshot above, you can see that on the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC we were able to increase the Power Limit up to 11% from the default, giving us much more TDP headroom. In addition, we did up the fan speed to 80% just to make sure we achieved the highest overclock, but the overclock worked just fine with the fan speed left on “Auto” anyway, and we will show the temperatures with the fans on “Auto” later in this review.
For the GPU Core Frequency,, we found the highest that was stable (with Voltage) was +380. Now, actually, we did manage to kick it up to +400, but we had to have the Voltage maxed out for +400, and ultimately, we question if that would have been playable for hours of gaming. We ended up bringing it down to +380 with a maximum +100 set on Voltage. Was this necessary? Well actually, it may not have been, but we were able to hit +370 without adding Voltage, which brought the clock speed to 3.2GHz.
We figured, though, that since the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC supports Voltage increases, and we are trying to push it as fast and stable as we can get it, why not go for it! Shoot for the moon! So we just cranked the Voltage up all the way (we had plenty of TDP with the Power Limit raised) and found that it worked great! At +380, you’ll see what that means for the clock speed below, but spoiler, slightly above 3.2GHz! 😮
On the memory side of things, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC operates at 30Gbps by default. Well, we managed to push it up just fine to +750, which set the memory at 31.5Gbps. We actually were able to hit 32Gbps. Briefly, we noticed a degradation, and we did get a game crash switching out of the game to the desktop. At 31.5Gbps, it sang beautifully in our testing. This improves the memory bandwidth from 960GB/s up to 1.008TB/s of bandwidth, breaking that 1TB/s barrier on this card. BTW, all of this worked fine with the fans on “Auto”.
Ok, so the default Boost clock on the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC is 2730MHz. By default, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC actually ran in games above 2820MHz while gaming pretty consistently. The exact average was 2828MHz. That already puts the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC 4% above even its specced GPU Boost clock and 8% above the RTX 5080 reference spec.
When we overclocked the GPU Frequency to +380 with maximum Voltage applied, the clock speed climbed way up to around 3210MHz (3.21GHz). The exact average was 3207MHz, but the maximum it could hit was 3217MHz briefly. When we upped it to +400, we saw it around 3220-3230MHz, but again we just weren’t confident with that one, so 3.2GHz it is! At 3207MHz this overclock is 13% above the default out-of-box GPU Boost clock while gaming! That is absolutely amazing, and we have also increased the memory bandwidth to 1TB/s as well, don’t forget that.
The final overclock was 3.2GHz/31.5Gbps (GPU/Mem).