Hi. I would like to test new Gigabyte RTX 3080 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce if this card working fine. What I don't understand is that Gigabyte says the base clock is 1440Mhz and boost is 1845Mhz but when Furmark is running I see only 1455-1620Mhz and Power Limit 1. GPU is connected with 2x 8pin PCIE cables to psu EVGA SuperNOVA 1200 P2. I was reading that one PCIE 8pin cable is cabable to deliver 150W but power limit of Gigabyte cards is 370W. Is this 1455Mhz-1620Mhz related to power limit? I just want to confirm that the card can reach this 1845Mhz but I don't know exactly how and what tools to use. Is Furmark right tool for this?
Try it ingame. Furmark is not a good app for testing what clocks your card can run at normally. You can enable the OSD in MSI afterburner to see clocks ingame.
150W max per 8 pin cable + 75W max from the PCIe Slot, so the in your case the card should be able to safely pull 375W max. Indeed. Try playing some demanding games for hours at max settings, high resolutions (3840x2160 or more if possible), Raytracing enabled (so you can test those RTX cores), etc. and monitor it with Afterburner's RTSS OSD. In addition, you can also turn on the display of limiters in the Afterburner OSD that will show you which limiter is at work at the moment. You can also us HWInfo64 to add more granular data to the OSD if you want.
Thanks. Indeed when I run Unigine Heaven the Core Clocks is above 2000Mhz. When I'm playing Assetto Corsa with SteamVR Valve Index 90Hz then it also reaches 2050Mhz. Thanks. I wasn't aware that PCIe Slot can deliver 75W. I think everything is fine. Do you know why in Furmark it can't reach even 1800Mhz and Power Limit is enabling right away. Also shoule I worry that in some game I'm reaching Power Limit when Core Clock is about 2000Mhz because I see in GPU-Z that I'm hitting Power Limit almost all the time. I think this is because temperatures are very low about 44C and system allows to raise Core Clocks with Voltage and this is causing Power Limit. But should I worry about it?
You'll almost always hit either a power limit or voltage limit whilst gaming unless you undervolt and underclock. It's perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. Also Furmark is designed to stress the gpu for stability, nothing more. It's not a good program to run as in the past it had issues with cards and now when it's detected by the GPU, it down clocks automatically.
I hit the power limit on my 3090, what worked for me was to undervolt, which reduced the power draw and enabled me to set the clock higher. All you need to do is undervolt a bit at a time until you no longer hit the power limit, at which point you can increase the clock a bit to take you back to the limit. Rinse and repeat until you reach the limit of stability or get bored. On my 3090FE, I currently have 2100MHz at 1.000v This could probably be tuned a bit finer but at some point you get bored of crashing and just want to use the damned thing.
Is it possible to undervolt it using for example MSI Afterburner, fine tune it with this software and then store it somehow in the gpu bios etc... I don't want that MSI Afterburner is running in the background because it makes SteamVR games stuttering all the time. It is possible to apply those voltage curves automatically without running MSI Afterburner? Where MSI Afterburner is storing its settings? How those settings/profile are applied and when?
Afterburner stores it's settings in RAM. It's not possible to write a voltage curve to the GPU BIOS at this time afaik.
It probably isnt afterburner making SteamVR games stutter but Riva tuner statistics server, try just disabling its functions and you might have it solved.
