Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox today we're going to be diving a little deeper into overclocking the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 TI covering a whole range of things from how to over hook these cards to typical achievable clock speeds to performance and power consumption if you have overclocked to a GPU before a lot of the things we go through in the guide section of this video will be pretty familiar to you there depending on what GPU you last overclocked there might be a few new things to note and of course if you're more interested in things like final overclocked performance and clock speeds you can just skip over the instructional section to start this video I'll be going through our standard methodology for overclocking Nvidia graphics cards and specifically the r-tx 20 ATT I will also be showing you how invidious new scanner API works and just how good their one-click overclocking can be comparing to a manual overclock while also showing you how to do set male overclock and of course the scanner API is new for these cheering cards the card we're using today is the founders Edition r-tx 2080 TI which does come factory overclocked in some sense compared to base level board partner models but that OC is you know it's quite a smaller just 90 megahertz on the core and nothing on the memory but the card we're using doesn't really matter the steps you see here will apply to all our TX 20 ATT icons so the first thing we'll be doing is going through potentially the easiest method of overclocking your our TX 2080 Ti and that's using invidious new scanner API one-click overclock II has been around for a while now but this time Nvidia has built a framework for doing it rather than letting board partners create their own algorithms and according to Nvidia their framework is better tuned for their GPUs more accurate and more reliable than any previous one-click methods to use in video scanner you'll need to grab one of the very latest versions of an overclocking utility the - we tried were EVGA precision x1 and MSI Afterburner both in their beta versions and for the scanner functionality we found afterburner to be more reliable I had a few crash issues with the early version of precision x1 which I assume will get fixed whereas afterburner seemed to work every time it's a business Onias precision has a much nicer interface than afterburner but we'll get back to using precision a bit later in the video so after you've installed and opened afterburner you'll see a bunch of dials and sliders bit of a cloud interface but that's fine what we're interested in is the small bar graph icon to the left of the core clock slider at this stage it's not necessary to touch anything else in the app simply click on the bar graph icon then click OC scanner and then in that window hit scan now you can sit back and wait a while because the one-click overclock process takes around 15 to 20 minutes what the scanner is doing is basically running a bunch of clock speed tests at a range of voltages to find the exact voltage frequency curve for your twenty atti Morel it has its own test algorithm built in to stress the GPU with the ability to recover from any hangs or crashes if the GPU is being pushed a bit too hard it's basically simulating what we'd do with the manual overclock but doing it faster and potentially more accurately don't worry if the application hands or your screen goes black temporarily during the process that's normal at the end you'll be given an average overclock but crucially you'll get a full frequency curve which potentially is a bit more efficient than a simple core frequency offset and you can see at the lower end of the voltage curve we're getting slightly higher over clocks than at the top on average we achieved plus 181 megahertz for our card but the top-end our OC is just around plus 150 ma Hertz at this point would recommend heading back into the afterburner main application and cranking up the power and temperature limits to the maximum we've never been shmurda card even a large generation Pascal card that didn't like having these limits raised all the way so with the 2080 ti it just makes sense to crank it up this will allow invidious GPU boost algorithm to push as high as possible on top of the frequency curve we've already set potentially going beyond the old limit one thing to note here is we have just set the power and temperature limit after running Nvidia scanner Nvidia says the scanner only modifies the core clock so if you change the power and temperature limits beforehand the scanner might find different and potentially higher core clocks however in our experience we actually achieved lower clocks in the scanner setting the power limit before hand so we recommend cranking it up after the scanner is complete the other obvious limitation is the lack of memory clock gains invidious can only handles the GPU core and doesn't touch memory so if you after that simple one-click overclock solution you'll be missing out on any games you'd get from tweaking memory core overclocking is much more important for getting performance gains but a booster memory can help out in some situations so we've got the scanner OC results now in the bag let's show you how to perform a manual overclock and after that we'll compare the manual overclock to the scan results for this with witching to EVGA precision x1 because it has a much nicer and more intuitive interface for a manual overclock we want to start from a decent point so again we're going to crank the power limit and temperature limits in the maximum we're also going to scroll the bottom section across to the temper tuner and adjust the curve so we're getting the maximum clock speed at all possible temperatures for our reference card this isn't a big deal as we're not reaching up to those highest temperatures but if you are running above 84 degrees Celsius you'll want to adjust this curve for maximum performance from here it's all about adjusting the two main sliders from memory and core frequency the basic steps are we want to increase each value by a reasonable amount apply the overclock then validate it in a program like 3d mark to ensure we're not getting crashes at those settings demand you increase the values is up to you but note that you're not going to damage your car by choosing a value that's too high instead you'll just crash your system and have to reset it so that's no big deal for the 28 ETI we started with around a +1 50 megahertz offset on the core and plus 500 on the memory those are fairly conservative figures for the card that worked in 3d mark so we pushed the crop to plus 200 and memory up to plus 650 if you want to play it a bit more safe we'd recommend only changing one of those values per test run but the more you become familiar with the process the more you can adjust at once with plus 200 on the core our 20 atti crashed in 3d mark so now it's a process of finding the exact limit we step down in 10 megahertz increments eventually discovering there +180 was unstable but plus 170 was perfectly fine from here we can try to push up the memory even further using a similar sort of process and for our model we settled on plus 700 B that sweet spot so our final stable overclock for this card was plus 170 mega Hertz on the core and at 700 megahertz on the memory and that's a fairly typical figure going on what we've seen from others note that if you have a non Fe on non-factory OSI card the core offset you'll need will be high as you're coming from a lower starting point once you find what you think our stable overclocked it's always a good idea to validate them further in a game running for several hours something you're very GPU intensive while 3dmax time spike gives a good indication of whether a card will work at a certain frequency sometimes it will only crash under a longer test so it's good to test both a quick note on voltage Nvidia stirring cards are voltage locked in other words Nvidia does not expose proper voltage controls to the user like you might get with overclocking a CPU on a motherboard instead we have a voltage slider but it's not really an offset what it theoretically does is raise the voltage limit by a few steps but it's still within what Nvidia deems safe and that comes at the expense of lifespan Nvidia claims you should get five years out of stock voltage and just one year with the voltage limit raised slightly so keep that in mind in practice raising the voltage slider did absolutely nothing for overclock where +1 70 megahertz on the core was stable under a zero voltage figure plus 180 mega Hertz with a maximum 100 voltage figure still wasn't stable you might have a different experience but it did absolutely nothing for us so in a pure clock offset basis the scanner OC coming in at around plus 150 megahertz the top voltage range is lower than our plus 1 70 megahertz manual overclock plus of course with manual overclocking release the memory frequency as well this indicates manual overclocking is still the way to go and you can see this is the case when looking at our shadow of the Tomb Raider results here the scanner provided a seven percent performance improvement over the FE clocks whereas our manual overclock produced a 12 percent improvement however the scanner does not overclock the memory for those looking for a quick overclock procedure one easy trick might be to use a fairly conservative memory overclock for simplicity's sake something like plus 600 megahertz going with that changes the results and makes the scanner + memory overclock 11% faster than the FE clocks but again the full manual overclock provides a slightly better result of further 1.5 percentage points so we've now shown that our manual overclock is very slightly superior to the results with the OC scan announced and a handful of games to see how the overclock compares to both stock and founders edition performance in shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 4k with the maximum quality settings and SMA T 2x we saw overclocking provides 16% more performance than the standard clocks for the 2080 ti and 12% more than the founders edition clocks that's not a bad result certainly worth doing but you're not going to have your socks blown off by the overclocking Headroom available in this card at least especially compared from the founders edition in Assassin's Creed origins a 4k ultrahigh preset the margins are a little narrower 11% performance increase over the default clocks and 9% over the founders edition in Far Cry 5 we're looking at 16% over the default and 12% over the founders edition again same results as shadow of the Tomb Raider in Middle Earth shadow of war there was a 14% improvement over default and 11% over founders edition and finally in Batman Arkham Knight 12% over default and 9% over founders edition so from those five games we achieved a performance improvement of 14% on average compared to the stock clocks and 10% compared to the founders edition clocks we're pretty much running into a power lumen here looking at the design of the power delivery system on the FE cards there might be a bit more Headroom available if Nvidia properly unlocked voltage controls but this is around as good as we're getting from what we can configure at the moment of course we should note that Nvidia do appear to be bidding their twenty atti GPUs graphics card shipped with stock clocks use one SKU while those with factory o'seas use a different potentially bin SKU this means that factory OC card should overclock a better than their non OC alternatives so while we are saying here that we achieved a 14% performance improvement compared to default clocks the reality is some cards shipped at default Cox won't OC as well in terms of temperatures and fan speeds what Steve found in his initial review of the 2080 TR is spot on in what I achieved on my test bench core temperatures increased from 76 degrees Celsius under load with the founders edition clocks to 81 degrees when overclocked that's a bit below the cards 1984 degrees temperature limit and well below the increased 88 degrees limit so it's pretty clear that that's not going to be a limiting factor for performance fan speeds as well 2060 rpm with the EFI clocks 20 90 when overclocked using the default auto fan speed so a slight increase there but really no difference to the sound profile the card is pretty quiet while overclocked also of course both the noise output and temperature will be different with board partner morals and if you're wondering about power consumption well there wasn't a lot of difference in load power draw between the default and founders edition clocks though that shouldn't be a huge surprise considering the FE clocks are only about three percent faster but when overclocked power draw increases by around fourteen percent on average compared to the FE clocks so a 14 percent increase in consumption for 10 percent more performance that's a pretty typical result if you're wondering about the actual clock speeds I achieved I was averaging around 1680 megahertz in shadow of the tomb raider with the stock clocks 17 70 megahertz with the FE clocks and around nineteen eighty megahertz when overclocked with a peak around 2100 megahertz I also tried overclocking with the fan set to 100 percent which dropped temperatures by twenty degrees Celsius but that only got around thirty to fifty megahertz and more out of the card and that was purely from GPU boost changing the clock offset resulted in instability running the fans at 100% resulted in less than or one percent boost to performance over our manual overclock with the fans on auto and of course the card is much louder at a hundred percent so it's really not worth it at least with our sample however those who installed liquid cools on the card might be able to eke out a bit of extra performance but not all that much so that just about wraps up this look into twenty atti overclocking with the cards we have on hand there is some extra performance to squeeze out and it will be interesting to see if anything more can be gained from additional tweaks particularly special mods to increase voltage for regular users though around a ten percent increase over EFI cards is expected and of course we shown every card results in our previous benchmark video so if you're interested what extra performance you'll be able to get with overclocking simply apply sort of a ten percent increase on average to those game results may your overclocking is still the go-to option though invidious scanner API is quite handy for those that don't want the pain of manual tweaking if you're interested now on going Nvidia r-tx coverage subscribe to get that content in your inbox and be sure to hit the bell icon to consider supporting us on patreon to chat directly with us about our TX cards you know exclusive discord or really about anything else in particular Steve's love of Mentos I'll catch you next time you