NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB “Ampere” Graphics Card Review

Overclocking The RTX 3080 For 4K Gaming

Overclocking the GA102 powered GeForce RTX 3080 will get much more attention down the road, but for now, we did a quick and dirty (but still stable) overclock using MSI Afterburner. We took the power slider to the 115% mark on the Power Slider and toyed with balancing the GPU and Memory as we crept up. Some have gotten massive overclocks on the memory, we did not. We managed to get a +500 mark on our memory which pushed us up to 20Gbps and a memory bandwidth of 800GB/s. We tried for +750 but memory protection kicked in and our performance suffered greatly.

The core was able to be pushed to +125 if we left the memory at +250, but found the memory gains more appreciable so we scaled the core back to +75 resulting in a gaming average clock rate between 1925-1960MHz.  Once overclocked this way the power draw rose quite a bit with us seeing the total system pull over 500w and the graphics card alone accounting for 369 of that. For the 5% or so uplift at 4K I would likely leave overclocking alone for now until you find you need it down the road.

Firestrike

Firestrike is running the DX11 API and is still a good measure of GPU scaling performance, in this test we ran the Ultra version of Firestrike which runs at 4K and we recorded the Graphics Score only since the Physics and combined are not pertinent to this review.

Time Spy

Time Spy is running the DX12 API and we used it in the same manner as Firestrike Extreme where we only recorded the Graphics Score as the Physics score is recording the CPU performance and isn't important to the testing we are doing here.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Rainbow 6 Siege

Rainbow 6 Siege has maintained a massive following since its launch and it consistently in Steams Top Ten highest player count game.  In a title where the higher the framerate the better in a tactical yet fast-paced competitive landscape is essential, we include this title despite its ludicrously high framerates.  We use the Vulkan Ultra preset with the High Defenition Texture Pack as well and gather our results from the built-in benchmarking tool.

Resident Evil 3

The Resident Evil 3 Remake has surpassed the RE2 Remake in visuals and is the latest use of the RE Engine.  While it does have DX12 support the DX11 implementation is far superior and because of that, we will be sticking to DX11 for this title.  We use the cutscene where Jill and Carlos enter the subway car for the first time and a 2 minute capture at that point.

Thermals

Thermals were measured from our open test bench after running the Time Spy graphics test 2 on loop for 30 minutes recording the highest temperatures reported. The room was climate controlled and kept at a constant 22c throughout the testing.

Power Consumption While Overclocked

 

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