RTX3070 fe overclock

[forteh]

Been pushing my 3070 in an attempt to squeeze the last couple of ms out of it.

So far I've gotten up to +175mhz core, +1250mhz ram, power at 105% with the stock fan curve.

It's currently 61st on the list (of 3600/3070 combo) on firestrike.

In DCS vr I can sustain a solid 2100mhz boost clock at 100% load with temps peaking at around 70°C, goes up to mid 70s when benchmarking. Core voltage peaks at 1070mv I think.

Can I realistically get much more out of it? The top of the firestrike list has much higher clock speeds, I presume that these are going to be on 100 fan/water loop to enable silly voltages?

Currently it's reasonably quiet and I'm looking for an every day overclock. It gains me around 1 - 1.5ms decrease in frametimes which isn't too be sniffed at.

Any thoughts or have I hit the ceiling for noise/heat level?

 

[Minstadave]

You need to explore undervolting to get the most out of it as the main limit is the power cap.

 

[forteh]

I've undervolted it since I got the card back in November as the noise was terrible compared to the strix 1070 it replaced, however I'm getting more performance from it wound up. That's not saying I hadn't undervolted incorrectly

It was locked down to 850mv previously and it was nicely quiet and obviously still blew the 1070 out of the water. Switching from stock to overclock back to back gets me from 14.5 to 13ms frametimes, that said I've not tested back to back with the undervolted profile.

Do you have a recommendation for how far to undervolt or is it purely a trial and error thing? Reducing the power limit in afterburner results in a proportional reduction in performance, is that the same as undervolting via the curve editor it have I got the wrong end of the stick?

 

[turbot1984]

Been pushing my 3070 in an attempt to squeeze the last couple of ms out of it.

So far I've gotten up to +175mhz core, +1250mhz ram, power at 105% with the stock fan curve.

It's currently 61st on the list (of 3600/3070 combo) on firestrike.

In DCS vr I can sustain a solid 2100mhz boost clock at 100% load with temps peaking at around 70°C, goes up to mid 70s when benchmarking. Core voltage peaks at 1070mv I think.

Can I realistically get much more out of it? The top of the firestrike list has much higher clock speeds, I presume that these are going to be on 100 fan/water loop to enable silly voltages?

Currently it's reasonably quiet and I'm looking for an every day overclock. It gains me around 1 - 1.5ms decrease in frametimes which isn't too be sniffed at.

Any thoughts or have I hit the ceiling for noise/heat level?

Those core volts are maxing the 220W power limit no doubt. Best get advice on optimal undervolt, I only know for 3080.

 

[Joxeon]

I've undervolted it since I got the card back in November as the noise was terrible compared to the strix 1070 it replaced, however I'm getting more performance from it wound up. That's not saying I hadn't undervolted incorrectly

It was locked down to 850mv previously and it was nicely quiet and obviously still blew the 1070 out of the water. Switching from stock to overclock back to back gets me from 14.5 to 13ms frametimes, that said I've not tested back to back with the undervolted profile.

Do you have a recommendation for how far to undervolt or is it purely a trial and error thing? Reducing the power limit in afterburner results in a proportional reduction in performance, is that the same as undervolting via the curve editor it have I got the wrong end of the stick?

See what voltage the card is using to hit 2100 MHz then set up a flat curve at those clocks but with less voltage than the card was using.

 

[forteh]

I'll have a play with it when I can (waiting for the toddler to decide to go to sleep ).

I think it was about the 1050mv for the 2100 core, so if I set a flat curve from 1025mv initially and then test downwards till I hit instability I should theoretically drop temps which will allow a higher core boost?

 

[Minstadave]

I'll have a play with it when I can (waiting for the toddler to decide to go to sleep ).

I think it was about the 1050mv for the 2100 core, so if I set a flat curve from 1025mv initially and then test downwards till I hit instability I should theoretically drop temps which will allow a higher core boost?

Drop both temps and power usage at that clock speed.

 

[forteh]

So I've been playing with the voltages but not making anything other than negatives to performance.

I've tried locking the clock to 1000mv and below @2100 on the curve editor and all is done is reduced the consistent clock speeds but not the temperatures to any significant degree.

Unlocked, the voltages get up to about 1080mv, temps up to 77°C and clock speeds stay above 2000mhz (typically 2050-2115).

Locked down, the voltages are obviously capped at 1000mv, temps up to 76°C and clock speeds drop down to around 1950.

Both with the vram running at +1275mhz

Stock Vs the overclocked is worth 10fps in DCS vr which is massive. Given that the fan profile and temps are basically the same between the two it makes no sense to run the undervolt.

 

[Aegis]

The max I got my 3070 Suprim X to at 107% power was 2070 on the core and (I think) +1380 on the VRAM. I ran the card at stock in benchmarks to see where it preferred to sit voltage-wise and stuck with that voltage (just upped the core frequency 'til it started crashing) - that was the only way I could get a 100% stable OC out of it - if I tried to run it at lower voltages it got pretty crash-happy.

 

[forteh]

That's about inline with what I've done apart from I didn't check the voltages at stock. Have you locked the voltage at all?

I can't go any higher on the core at current 105% power, it instacrashes on heaven as soon as it runs. I doubt want to feed it more voltage to try to get more.

The memory might have some more in it, will have to try winding the core back and pushing the ram up till instability then try with the core back up to +175.

 

[Aegis]

Have you locked the voltage at all?

Yeah, I should've been more specific - I ran the card at stock to see where its 'ideal' voltage sits then created a custom curve in Afterburner that's flat from there on up (select the node on the voltage you want to use, raise it to the frequency you want then hit 'L' to lock it then apply - that'll get you most of the way there - then you can adjust the remaining nodes and unlock the voltage/frequency with 'L' again).

My card had a default OC boost clock of 1950 I think, so the 2070 I was getting wasn't a huge uptick (+120 MHz) - the real boost came from upping the GDDR6 which seems to OC really well on the 3070.

Basically the idea was, rather than trying to force the card to run at different voltage, find the voltage it's 'happiest' at and see how hard I can push it. Can't say whether it was the greatest 3070 OC ever, but UserBenchmark was impressed at least: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/51017436

 

[PaulCa]

I spent an evening trying to get more out of the 3080 Eagle. 100% power limit only.

I got it to benchmark Time Spy to 17,040. That was +250Mhz Core, +1000Mhz RAM.

Then I tried undervolting the curve to get more Hz per mV, but after wasting hours, while I could find it's nice "undervolt, underpower" profile, that lost me about 3% performance. I could not find any significant performance and gave up. I was basically taking each voltage and moving it up and up until Heaven crashed or the clocks went "down". Using heaven with the camera paused staring at a fixed scene (with enough things moving to know it's not crashed) and watching the framerate while live modifying the curve.

Basically, as expected, I could go lower on the clocks in most places, I could go much, much higher on them in many places too, however, as soon as I did, it would 'still' hit the power limiter and step back down a mV on the curve. When I tried overclocking the lower end like 800mV or 850mV I could get it to be stable around 1920Mhz, 1935Mhz was unstable.

After long hours, I was getting LOWER scores in eveything and some benchmarks were crashing, I had a random reset on desktop. As a last ditch effort I tried the MSI OC Scanner on the curve. To be honest, apart from being a little more cautious than I, it came to the same conclusion. If can be made more power efficient lower in the curve, but, the stock curve is pretty must as good as I can get it for outright performance.

That damn power limiter. It even seems in some situations that lowering the voltage does not actually lower the power, meaning the amps much have increased. There is just too much auto clocking and dynamic tom-foolery going on with the chips themselves to work out what the numbers are doing and why, half the time.

Back to stock curve, +250Mhz +1000Mhz and then I get drop outs in VR in DCS. Like 1 second black screens every minute or so. Checked temps, all fine seemed, all graphs looked fine. Except the X570 chipset temp which had slowly risen and suspiciously pinned solid at 65*C. The case was sitting on the desk and the warm evening sun was hitting the back of the case, I put my hand on it and it was super hot to the touch. I pulled the curtains and ran all the fans at max until everything came back to under 30*C and ran DCS and it was fine. 70-80FPS in VR in Syria, leaving Beirut city. No stalls.

DCS is fully capable of bring the card to it's knees. Just a few twitches of the sliders and it comes down hard to <35 FPS. So plenty of card left in the game.

Far Cry 6 however, sync'ed to the 75Hz display hovers around 85-95% utilisation and my radiator fans barely hit 25%, GPU at 51*C. Nice and quiet.

Now... I have been tempted into watching videos on how to flash the VBios. From what I can tell, the 3080 Eagle and the 3080 Eagle OC seem to only differ in the power limiter. The OC gets 105% I think. I'm sure I could accidentally download the wrong one, would be an honest mistake. First need to see if the Eagle has a BIOS switch and just how dangerous it would be if it doesn't. It's an expensive thing to brick.



Paul
Current Build: 5800X+x73, 3080+AlphaCool Eiswolf V2, 32Gb, Crosshair Hero 8 Wifi, Firecuda 500Gb, Fractal Define 7

 

[PaulCa]

On clocking the RAM. I am told that GDDR6 has increased memory error correction features. So before you would see a gain in performance right up until you see artifacts, glitching and crashing. However with GDDR6 you can start to see negative performance increase before you get artifacts. So it pays to go up in chunks and check your actual performance is going up with the clock, when it plateus take it back 100Mhz.

I have seen this when I put my mem up to +1250Mhz. I will benchmark, but not stably and performance when it does complete is lower than +1000Mhz.

 

[forteh]

Yeah I've also found that for best performance the stock curve is pretty damn good, anything above +175 on the core artifacts but I'm not too interesting in upping voltage to chase the last few mhz. If I drop to 850mv then the temperatures stay below 65 but then is only clocking to 1800mhz instead of 2100mhz.

Interesting about the error correction in the gddr6, I've yet to find an ceiling that causes artifacts on the memory; this is probably the error correcting as you've mentioned. I have also seen some slight reduction on fire strike scores at the higher end of the memory speeds I've been using. Will try winding it back a bit and see if I can fine tune it better, I was jumping in 50mhz steps before so it's not taken too much time to see the performance drops.