The GTX 1080-Ti Thread

I can tell you that Precision XOC simply does not work at the moment so you won't have any way to monitor your icx sensors or set a fan profile. You'll have to use another companies software to spin 1 fan to cool the card or just go stock with no software. EVGA is not the company they used to be unfortunately.

 

Interesting. I never really planned on using anything other than MSIAB. Are you saying that a custom fan curve in MSIAB only spins one fan on the card? If so, can I leave the fan curve on auto and use MSIAB to overclock and max out power limits and voltage and have both fans function?

 

I run min using the voltage curve at 2032mhz at 1.012v and 11.7ghz memory. I slapped an EVGA Hybrid on it a with a couple of Sycthe GT AP-13's at 90% push/pull. At ~1000 rpm they are inaudible. I have to work pretty hard to get the temps over the low 50C range. If I'm running an older game with vsync, even at 4K it stays in the mid 40C.

 

Yes. You can do that and it will only spin 1 fan since they are asynchronous. AFAIK only 1 fan will work. ATM I am using Asus GPU Tweak 2 -- it's stable and functional.

 

Man, some of you really lucked out with your cards. My Ti wont seem to overclock at all. Not even the memory and it runs hot. If I dont use a custom fan curve it idles at 59c. My room is decently cool and I have good airflow in my full tower case. When gaming it can hit 87c!

edit: I lied a little lol. For whatever reason before whenever I would oc my card AT ALL, 3dmark would crash almost instantly. My post made me want to try again and now I can run my card at +500 on the memory....how strange. Any added to the core makes it crash pretty fast though.

 

Wow! Talk about getting a nice GPU bin. Over 2GHz with less than stock voltage, that is wicked. So I went to meet my friend to buy the EVGA 1080 Ti SC Black and he had an EVGA FTW3 version as well so I got that instead. It sure is interesting messing around with it so far. Even on the normal BIOS toggle it clocks itself up to 1962MHz - 1974MHz depending on the game. That is the highest stock boosting I've encountered on a Pascal GPU thus far. Of course being a Guru made me want to push some OC anyway, but the slightest nudge of the core clock will nearly instantly crash everything. Even upping core voltage and trying again after a reboot does the same thing. I can overclock the memory just fine, with +500 or +550 being the highest before bench scores and FPS starts getting lower.

The default fan curve is quite aggressive, but I don't want to touch it and lose the use of all 3 fans. The "no fans until 60C" kind of thing actually kicks in at 55C and the fans get to where I can just hear them when GPU temps are ~70C. After exiting a game or bench the fans slowly rev down but don't turn off until all 9 sensors are at or below 45C! With the OC BIOS toggle one of the fans never stops running, the power limit goes up from 117% to 128%. I'm going to tinker with the card some more today to see what MSIAB can and can't control.

Are you saying you are using Asus GPU Tweak 2 to control your fans and only 1 fan will run, or it supports all the fans? At the moment I'm using MSIAB/RTSS for clock control and leaving all fan stuff on auto.

Is this the smaller sized 2 fan Zotac model? Not the mini, but the normal kind of sized one? So far with my EVGA FTW3 model I can OC the memory just fine, but any adjustment to the core clocks at any voltage will crash everything. If you have any luck with core OC let me know.

 

Yes, its the 2 fan Amp edition from Zotac. I will try messing with the voltage but considering how hot it already runs, I am not sure I want to do that! Clocks right now boost to 1957ish. I think trying to undervolt at this point for less heat would be more beneficial for me. Before it gets hot, it runs around 1987 on the core and then drops as it gets warmer. I will let you know!

 

Yeah, from what I remember my friend had a Zotac 980Ti with the 2 fan cooler and it just couldn't handle the heat. You might be better off undervolting like you said, I'm about to the point where that is what I'm going to do.

Reason being, this card is not totally stable unless I take 2 or 3 steps down on the core clock. I was trying to test some games and then play with a friend, and I got hard locks in GTAV, PCARS2, Sniper Elite 3 and Grim Dawn with all GPU settings at stock on the normal BIOS. After hours of thinking it might be the driver (398.36) or my CPU OC, I finally starting taking clocks of the GPU core and all the games are running fine now. It sucks that I seem to have gotten a lemon (add it to my LONG list of poorly OC'ing parts) but I'd rather have a slightly slower ~1925MHz and be stable than sit on the edge of my chair in every game just wondering when it will freeze at ~1970MHz.

Once I'm sure the core is stable I'll start adding memory overclocks 100MHz at a time and playing lots of games. With the core clock in the lower 1900's I've gotten the memory up to a +800MHz OC and it was still adding FPS to both Firestrike and Heaven, so maybe a good memory OC will help me claw back some lost performance from the unstable stock core speeds. All in all this has been an interesting adventure thus far, it almost makes me wish there was a silicon lottery website for GPU's as well.

Lastly, if I make a custom fan curve in MSIAB it only changes what the fan closest to the PCI bracket does. No matter what I set, the other 2 fans still do their own thing that seems to be tied to the extra MEM and VRM sensors this card has. I'll probably report back over the next week as to how my tweaking and tuning adventures go. At this point I'm thinking I'll keep this 1080Ti quiet and cool rather than push it to the edge of its life for an extra 4%-5% FPS, and put off getting a 4k screen until I see what the 1180 can do.

 

Well as expected, adding voltage did absolutely nothing but add even more heat and crashes within 5 minutes of adding any core clocks. And to make it better, my video card fans make a vibration noise as soon as it hits 82 °C which almost every game does after 15 minutes haha. Good thing I use headphones when at my desk station. I had the memory at +500 but it crashed on a game after about 30-40 minutes so now its at +400. I actually might need to revisit my case cooling as everything seems to run a bit warm. I have a full tower Phantom case with plenty of fans but perhaps I could tweak the push/pull a bit. Or maybe my video card is just a hot bastard haha!

Bummer that you get hard locks at stock clocks, that should not be happening! My memory oc was adding to 3dmark and Heaven too, and it ran stable for me as well but gaming was a different story as mentioned above. But even +400 added ~5 fps to most games which I consider a win. Anything that pushed me closer to holding 120 fps! Perhaps lowering my clock will help regain some memory oc as well, we can adventure this together

How are you telling that that MSIAB is only changing the first fan? Are you running a custom fan curve? I am but it only seems to help with idle temps, and it drops it by about 10 °C.

Good luck!

 

Temps are the most important thing. Your first 'temp bin' for clocks is way down around 40C. So, if your idle temps are already that high, you're already a couple of bins down in your clocks from the beginning. My idle temps are, depending upon the room temp, 20-24C. If you have plenty of case airflow, I'd consider checking the TIM if it doesn't void your warranty. Almost 90C under load seems way to high.

 

Well I feel slightly dumb...I opened up my case to re-evaluate my cooling and instantly went "you gotta be kidding me." I have 2 120mm case fans on the side door but they are low and to the front by the hard drive bays. There is a spot for a 200mm fan on the side and guess where it will blow air directly on? I hate it when I overlook silly things like that.

200mm fan ordered off Amazon, will be here on Thursday. I wonder how much it will help....

 

Ah, that might help. Temps aren't really my issue since I have a Cooler Master XB EVO cube case, so the GPU sits vertically and blows the vast majority of the heat it makes right out of the mesh top. I just can't believe this GPU is so close to instability that any change in core clocks at any voltage from 1.00 to 1.09 will make it lock up in about 5 seconds. Something is off and I need to find it. After work today I'm going to backup all my MSIAB/RTSS stuff, uninstall it and download the most recent XOC and see if the auto OC feature can figure out something I can't. All this trouble almost makes me want to trade the FTW3 back to my friend for his 1080Ti SC Black instead...

 

Your case fan may not be able to offload enough air to handle the gfx card.
Blow a house fan inside the open side of the case.
If things improve drastically you have your answer.

 

Okay, the struggle is officially over and I have given up. After 8 hours of testing, tweaking and tinkering the day I got this card and 10 more hours today (! Yes, I did a short work day) I have decided that I got a lemon. It is not stable out of the box using either BIOS, more voltage doesn't help, attempting to undervolt made the card laugh at me, and after uninstalling MSIAB and trying out XOC I now know it isn't a software issue. XOC is junk compared to MSIAB, and it's "EVGA only auto OC scan" feature made about 470 of the 4101 event ID things and locked itself up AND shut down my computer on its own!

As for undervolting testing, I slowly went through each voltage point with Heaven or Firestrike running and I would take each frequency step and move it down a voltage point. 1911MHz @ 1.080v -> 1911MHz @ 1.075v, 1898MHz @ 1.075v -> 1898MHz @ 1.062v and so on. Nothing worked at all so I thought maybe this chip would like to remain at 1.093v to try the other end of the spectrum. Nope, that tops out at 1924MHz and significantly increases noise and heat output. I've checked my serial numbers and all that stuff to make sure I didn't get one of EVGA's DT (down tuned) variants, but it sure feels like it.

Considering the fact that I read almost 20 pages of Newegg and Amazon reviews of the FTW3 and picked out the ones where people had OC numbers and most of them were complaining about how the couldn't get beyond 2088MHz core and 12000MHz memory, I think mine is like a pig with lipstick. Also of note, apparently EVGA did what I like to call "pulling a Gigabyte" and ruined the revision of the FTW3 after the launch batch by obviously giving it subpar GPU's and binning the nice ones for the Classified and Kingpin cards. You can tell which card you have by the BIOS switch names, with "Master / Slave" options being a much better card than the "Normal / OC" options that are more recent and is what I have.

I thought about pulling the card apart to check all the thermal pads and redo the thermal paste, but temps aren't really a problem even when it is 80F in my house because it is 100F+ outside in Texas right now. According to the Gamer's Nexus teardown it has more than a dozen tiny screws that are tightly wound, and also several short and breakable wires so I'm putting that off for now. Like I said before, I'm just done fighting this card and I'm going to sell it as soon as an ASUS Strix or MSI Gaming version of an 1180 comes out.

At this point I have to max out the voltage slider *and* take -50MHz from the core clock to get it stable in games. That leaves me at about 1840MHz - 1860MHz depending on game load and temperature. I was finally able to do a full 15 minute practice, 15 minute qualifying, and 30 minute race in PCARS 2 without a crash or freeze. Leaving the card at stock or trying to OC usually crashed during practice or qualifying, and also crashed in GTAV when entering areas with more grass and trees to render. My next test tomorrow is to leave the core in the mid 1800's and start adding memory clock 100MHz at a time to see if games remain stable or not. Rant over!

 

That qualifies as defective, you can return it.

 

BuildeR2 are you saying that your card can´t clock higher than 1860Mhz??? That seems very low because every 1080ti seems to clock higher than 1900Mhz without any overclock or tweak, just relying on turbo boost. For example my card is a MSI 1080ti Duke, basically the the cheapest and weakest Ti MSI offers and it goes higher than 1900Mhz at stock settings without any problem. And i can overclock it over 2000Mhz and like i said before, this is the worst Ti in the MSI range.

Could your problem be software related like crappy drivers or some windows issues? Anyway good luck with your card.

 

I've been so busy with work and then going straight to testing this card, that thought hadn't even crossed my mind. I'll look into it but I have to be able to use my computer for work every day and I'm not going to have a backup GPU soon. Never tried my onboard Intel GPU but maybe that would work. Also, reading through some posts on the EVGA forums it looks like they recently changed warranty/RMA stuff so I would somehow need to get an invoice for the cash I gave my friend so that EVGA believes I bought and now own the card. Maybe @HeavyHemi could clear that up since I saw a good bit of them over there.

I mean, technically, it could be any of those things. I don't think it is Windows since this 1803 install is pretty recent and my previous GPU worked just fine. Possibly drivers, I've only tried the most recent 2 and had the same outcome. Also MSIAB/RTSS is a fresh install as of yesterday and power monitoring is off. It isn't that the card *can't* clock past 1860MHz, it just isn't stable when stock settings boost it up around 1950MHz. If anybody wants to compare with my current stable settings (-50 core, +300 mem) I'm getting 3837 points in Heaven with max settings and 8xAA @ 1080p.

 

Speaking of EVGA 1080ti, I had one (the 12Ghz vram clock edition) for a week. Was never impressed by the card, noisy, heavy, not impressive temp, mediocre evga percision software (and the only solution to control fan and voltage), and mediocre out the box clocks compared to compition(barely boosts to 1911 under load, and dips to 1898 in intensive scenes). I returned it (too much for a $849 card)

 

wrong thread

 

Hi. Wrong thread. Unless you have a customized laptop model with 1080-Ti inside. Your gpu is just a 1080.