overclocking a 1080ti

[VeganJoy]

through a series of admittedly extraordinary events i swapped my old, dusty, lame founders edition 1080ti for a NIB evga 1080ti ftw3 with half a year of warranty left, all at no cost to myself. it's a real nice card lmao. it runs very, very cool which should probably be expected but wow did my FE run hot. a 300w load in furmark doesnt push this card over 65C, and the fans dont go over 50%. messing with afterburner (max voltage and power limits) brings me up to a 50mhz core OC and +600 on the memory which aint too bad. buuuuut i'm guessing there's more to be had here  

 

so i'm considering flashing a new bios to the card and seeing if that'll net me some more gainz. question 1) how bad of an idea is this? 2) how much more could i reasonably expect to get out of this card? 3) would flashing a new bios be as easy as running nvflash and just sticking a kingpin or whatever bios on the card and bam it works?

[Matrices]

When it comes to overclocking the 1080 Ti, since I have four (two PNY Blower Editions [VCGGTX1080T11PB-CG] and two NVIDIA Founder Editions), there's some variability on the core clock since no two GPU dies are exactly the same when it comes to achieving a certain overclock at a given voltage and current and consequent power draw. I've gotten at least 2000 MHz on the core and 11 GHz on the memory (I don't touch the memory frequency), I didn't get crashing on two cards in SLI when running GTA V at max settings, at 4K+ resolution. The XOC BIOS will unlock power limits beyond 120% of TDP (300 W) and allow for voltage increase beyond the maximum permissible (1.093 V) on the stock BIOS to 1.2 V; this means you will easily surpass 300 W and in most cases 500+ W during full load if you overclock beyond 2.1 GHz on the core and past 11 GHz on the memory. Just keep in mind that the XOC BIOS loosens VRAM timings to slacken the load on the IMC so that higher overclocks can be achieved on the memory, which hurts the GPU's IPC (slightly lower performance per clock on the core frequency due to looser VRAM timings), so for example XOC at 2.1 GHz core at 12 GHz on the VRAM would be equal to a stock BIOS at 2 GHz at 12 GHz VRAM. There are some videos about this on YouTube: 

 

[VeganJoy]

1 hour ago, Matrices said:

When it comes to overclocking the 1080 Ti, since I have four (two PNY Blower Editions [VCGGTX1080T11PB-CG] and two NVIDIA Founder Editions), there's some variability on the core clock since no two GPU dies are exactly the same when it comes to achieving a certain overclock at a given voltage and current and consequent power draw. I've gotten at least 2000 MHz on the core and 11 GHz on the memory (I don't touch the memory frequency), I didn't get crashing on two cards in SLI when running GTA V at max settings, at 4K+ resolution. The XOC BIOS will unlock power limits beyond 120% of TDP (300 W) and allow for voltage increase beyond the maximum permissible (1.093 V) on the stock BIOS to 1.2 V; this means you will easily surpass 300 W and in most cases 500+ W during full load if you overclock beyond 2.1 GHz on the core and past 11 GHz on the memory. Just keep in mind that the XOC BIOS loosens VRAM timings to slacken the load on the IMC so that higher overclocks can be achieved on the memory, which hurts the GPU's IPC (slightly lower performance per clock on the core frequency due to looser VRAM timings), so for example XOC at 2.1 GHz core at 12 GHz on the VRAM would be equal to a stock BIOS at 2 GHz at 12 GHz VRAM. There are some videos about this on YouTube: 

 

i'll have to watch that video in a bit, but damn i thought my 980ti pulling 360w was excessive lol. 300w has me at 65C so 400w is probably the upper end of what i'll be able to realistically dissipate with the ftw3 cooler id assume. im pretty new to overclocking so i wasnt aware that upping the gpu voltage would affect achievable memory clocks. i'm at about 1900 core and 11k memory in afterburner i think, so getting to >2000 core and 12k on vram would be maybe 10% faster? between the memory or core clocks which would be the priority for performance?

[Matrices]

8 minutes ago, VeganJoy said:

i'll have to watch that video in a bit, but damn i thought my 980ti pulling 360w was excessive lol. 300w has me at 65C so 400w is probably the upper end of what i'll be able to realistically dissipate with the ftw3 cooler id assume. im pretty new to overclocking so i wasnt aware that upping the gpu voltage would affect achievable memory clocks. i'm at about 1900 core and 11k memory in afterburner i think, so getting to >2000 core and 12k on vram would be maybe 10% faster? between the memory or core clocks which would be the priority for performance?

Honestly, GPU overclocking is entirely a crapshoot for me, I really don't know what I'm doing. I just set the core clock frequency to 2000 MHz on both cards and leave the memory at 11,000 MHz, I believe I can push to 2,050 MHz core clock frequency on both cards, and setting the TDP limit to 120% (300 W), core voltage to max (1.093 V), temperature limit to 90 degrees C, and fans to 100%, I can usually play in GTA V on max settings without crashing. When it comes to power consumption, FFXV loads my GPU more than any other title I've tested. Quake II RTX is also extremely demanding, but FFXV puts 100% load on my GPU memory controller and the core, easily 300+ W all the time with all settings maxed out at 4K resolution, forcing SLI (no scaling in FFXV loads both GPUs to more than 300 W+.

As far as an overclock to 2,000 MHz compared to 1,900 MHz max boost frequency (most 1080 Tis should reach this) on the core frequency, and an increase on the memory frequency from 11 GHz to 12 GHz, using the stock BIOS of your card, I do think a 10% increase in graphics performance should be realistic. I just never did any concrete comparison on my own end compared to stock versus the overclock, but I do notice some performance increase. My CPU might be bottlenecking me, though, in CPU-bound scenarios when running at lower resolutions/graphics settings.

[VeganJoy]

2 minutes ago, Matrices said:

Honestly, GPU overclocking is entirely a crapshoot for me, I really don't know what I'm doing. I just set the core clock frequency to 2000 MHz on both cards and leave the memory at 11,000 MHz, I believe I can push to 2,050 MHz core clock frequency on both cards, and setting the TDP limit to 120% (300 W), core voltage to max (1.093 V), temperature limit to 90 degrees C, and fans to 100%, I can usually play in GTA V on max settings without crashing. When it comes to power consumption, FFXV loads my GPU more than any other title I've tested. Quake II RTX is also extremely demanding, but FFXV puts 100% load on my GPU memory controller and the core, easily 300+ W all the time with all settings maxed out at 4K resolution, forcing SLI (no scaling in FFXV loads both GPUs to more than 300 W+.

lol i get you, overclocking ends up feelin like you're just flinging shit at a wall to see what'll stick  guess i'll have to fiddle around with everything. when running furmark i noticed the framerate was heavily affected by mem clocks so i'll have to see what will be my bottlenecks in my use cases. thanks for the pointers!