Quiet mode fan setting = better performance?!?

TycStyle · January 13, 2021

Hi all,

This week I swapped my 3700x for a 5800x as well as a recent upgrade from a 5700xt to the Evga RTX 3080 Xc3 Ultra. All of this is stuffed in the Lian Li TU150 (I don't go to LAN parties, just found it was a cool case without all pre-built stuff inside) and installed on the Gigabyte I Aorus X570 Pro Wifi. Combined with CL16 G.Skill Trident Z Neo (2x8) 3600, powered by the Corsair Sf600 80+ platinum.

The cpu cooler is the Scythe Mugen 5 PCGH edition, which receives it's push from a Kaze flex 1200 rpm fan (for max. Silent cooling, replacing the 800rpm ones out of the box). The pull/exhaust and the case intake, are the Noctua NF-a12x25.

M.2 nvme pcie 4.0 1TB Gigabyte Aorus + Samsung 970 Evo Plus.

No OC on GPU or CPU only XMP profile activated.

So here's the deal; 3DMark Timeslot (not the holy grail, but at least gives something proper to analyze), gives a result of just over 16000, which is a bit under average, but doesn't feel that bad. But the temp of the gpu goes above 80 (84/85), cpu stays nicely cool around 60.

Because the latest chipsets were missing the Ryzen powerplants, plus in my old setup I tweaked the fans so the curve was much smoother, I made some similar adjustments. But long story short; when I turn up the case fans (f.e. simply to performance or Super speed) , the performance of the benchmarks crashes into the mud, like into 13000 range.

So at this point, the BEST result is achieved by the quiet setting on the fans.

Btw, the front intake and exhaust are split to the fan header, the intake fan is on its own on the CPU fan header.

Could this be caused by some kind of turbulence? Or do you guys have ANY idea what is causing the performance hit? The new combo is a bit hotter obviously, and the sff cases suffer from flow, but does this sound logical? Or any other pointers?

This is really tweaking that makes you go mad, just want some nice balanced performance/thermals/noise setup but this doesn't make any sense to me...

Much appreciated,

Edited January 13, 2021 by TycStyle
Missing info (case fan increase)

GhostRoadieBL · January 13, 2021

You might be power limited, 600w with that hardware is pretty tight for amperage available.

When on silent your hardware should be at a slightly lower but more consistent clock speed but with more cooling it will try to hit higher clocks causing the power limit to aggressively downclock and your overall score will fall.

This can happen on both cpu and gpu with how they boost past stock clocks even when not manually overclocked

TycStyle · January 13, 2021

Thanks for that. I considered it of course, but until today did not act due to the YouTube vid by Optimum Tech on Rtx 3080 + Overclocked Intel cpu (with multiple lower watt psu's) was no issue for my specific one, but how to be sure....