Longevity of the 1080 Ti with power mod on air?

[Harry Voyager]

The new rig is up and running with the Reverb and its 4k resolution, and lows are about 39 fps when things get heated, and that is at 100% GPU loading on a 1080 TI Founders Edition. So it's time to overclock. 

 

I'm reading that with the power mod* one can push another 10-20% out of it, but there were concerns about longevity and vrm overheating with the stock Founders Edition blower. How did that actually work out over the long term? Did really end up burning boards after a year or so? And did anyone find out whey the VRMs were getting to without added cooling? 

 

I'm looking to keep this going for another year or two until there's some price competition at the high end between AMD and nVidia. 

 

Thank you, 

 

Harry Voyager

 

*Defined as shorting the shin capacitors so the GPU can draw additional current. See: 

 

Edited November 8, 2019 by Harry Voyager

[Vishera]

What power mod?

The one with the liquid metal on a shunt resistor?

[Bombastinator]

Definition of “power mod” is inexact.  Also “gps” must be some sort of typo, but it’s a confusing one for me.  The likely correction would be to FPS, but it could also be a temperature reading from something.  Either the CPU or some part of the GPU.

 

Future price completion may not happen.  It’s a duolopoly.  Intel may change that, but I don’t know about the high end with that.

 

i suspect the current price competition at the mid range is an anomaly.

[Harry Voyager]

@Vishera Yes, shorting the power shuts to increase the total power available to the GPU. 

 

@Bombastinator Autocorrect often thinks it knows more about what I'm typing about than I do. It is helpful like that. Added a link to the source video into the original post.

 

Price competition will happen if and only if AMD or Intel are able to produce a GPU equal or better than nVidia's top end card. It is inevitable under those conditions, save price fixing, which is currently unlikely, and would attract lawyers like flies. Witness the current price cuts on the Cascade Lake-X CPUs currently going on, along with the effective price cuts Intel has been making to its desktop chips in the form of down shifting it's current chip lineup for their 10th gen parts. They're basically going to retail the equivalent to the I9-9900K as a $350 part. 

 

I will contend that current prices are an anomaly driven by the Bitcoin mining crazy skyrocketing demand at the same time that Vega's failure as a high end GPU drove AMD out of that market segment. I got my 1080 Ti in March of 2017 at a retail price of $650, yet the same card today still goes for $1000+. That's a serious price distortion for old electronics. 

[Ebony Falcon]

U want to power mod a founders card ? Are u insane ? 
they do it for benchmarking only not long term use 

 

just oc ur card to its max and leave it 

[Vishera]

Also there is the risk of galvanic action.

I have seen someone got really bad corrosion on the card after the mod (pretty sure that person used too much liquid metal and it spilled on the board)

[Mick Naughty]

Sounds more like a gpu upgrade is in order. No overclock on a 1080ti is gonna help. They don’t clock well as it is. Even on water and a shunt mod won’t yield much to make the work worth it. 

 

But if you wonna try it, I wouldn’t be against it. I’d do the same stuff. 

[Harry Voyager]

Ok. Then I'll see what I can do between plain MSI Afterburner overclocking and the CPU OC/tuning, and shelve the mod.

 

Honestly, I'd probably use kaptape or something similar instead of liquid metal, but the added draw on the PCB and VRMs was still a big question mark.

 

I find myself wondering if the VRMs are close enough to the heat sink that a thermal pad could join them? I'll have to look at some of the available tear-down videos. 

[Harry Voyager]

45 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

Sounds more like a gpu upgrade is in order. No overclock on a 1080ti is gonna help. They don’t clock well as it is. Even on water and a shunt mod won’t yield much to make the work worth it. 

 

But if you wonna try it, I wouldn’t be against it. I’d do the same stuff. 

Not necessarily yet. The key break point in VR is 45fps. If you can keep the minimum frames above 45 fps, you'll have no stutters or doubled frames. The 39 fps lows are very close to that, and my average is around 50 fps in heavy scenes, so I'm around about where I need to be at. I'm just needing that last 10-15% to get over that threshold. 

 

Once I'm at that, the next hurdle is being able to support that at 8k by 2k, rather than 4k by 2k, so I can have peripheral vision. (A significant amount of air combat involves tracking a moving target over your shoulder while seated. 90 degrees of off center vision cuts that off.) Given my current results and the benchmark aid current GPUs, I do not believe that is achievable in this generation, and is unlikely in the next generation.