Gigabyte disappoints with coolers on RTX 30 cards

MustafaXIX · March 24, 2021

I've had 3 different Gigabyte RTX 30 series cards. 1 3060Ti Gaming OC Pro, 3070 Vision and now I'm currently using an Aorus Master 3070. Gigabyte have slapped big heatsinks on all of these cards, Aorus Master with the biggest.

I was surprised by how aggressive the stock vbios fan curve is, Gigabyte/Aorus obviously know how bad the cooling is so they've made the fans spin up much faster to kind of remedy it at the cost of extra wear to the fan bearing and more noise.

Let me describe my experience. I've had 3 RTX 3070 cards, 1 FE, 1 Vision and 1 Aorus Master. Currently using the Aorus Master, other have been sold.

The FE fans didn't even spin past 1500RPM and were very silent. The card would reach up to 70C in my setup. The Vision fans spun up towards 2200RPM (which is quite loud, around 75% of fan speed) when the card reaches close to 65C. Same story with the Aorus Master. How does a card with a much smaller heatsink and *one less fan* manage to keep thermals in safe margins while keeping fan speeds a whole 500 to 600RPM lower?!

Credit where credit's due, Nvidia did a smashing job of their FE cards this time around. Silent. Looks good. Runs well.

Gigabyte, you guys did bad. Very disappointing especially for how much you're charging. No doubt using the cheaper direct copper contact method instead of a flat cold plate to cut costs even though these cards are popping up for more than £200 over MSRP in retailers.

I'm currently trying to secure an MSI Suprim or ASUS TUF 3070, as both have much better cooling than any gigabyte card from reviews and comparisons I've seen, and I'll either return or sell on this Aorus Master. Gigabyte have left a bad taste in my mouth. People, in a stock alert server I'm in, warned me and I didn't listen thinking there's no way they could charge £720 for a 3070 and put a weak cooler on it... I was wrong. (You can tell a cooler is bad when comparing like-for-like fan speeds and noise. I lowered fans to 50% to get speeds and noise in a comfortable range but the card runs to over 70c and throttles clock = bad cooler which they tried to fix with aggressive stock fan speeds)

Anyone interested in buying a Gigabyte card, I recommend try buying from a different board partner as I've told others

Moonzy · March 24, 2021

can i add that my gigabyte 3090 could only mine ETH at roughly 90MH/s on its own due to VRAM temp throttling?

my MSI gaming x trio 3090 could do 120MH/s without much of anything needed (120MH/s is the expected non throttling temp)

sure, MSI VRAM is at 110c too, but it's not throttling.

i slapped an AMD wraith spire onto the gigabyte card's backplate, and it barely broke 106MH/s

Here photo:

Spoiler

tishous · March 24, 2021

8 minutes ago, MustafaXIX said:

How does a card with a much smaller heatsink and *one less fan* manage to keep thermals in safe margins while keeping fan speeds a whole 500 to 600RPM lower?!

Well one reason off the top of my head is that the Aorus Master has a higher power draw, as well as a factory OC, resulting in more heat produced. Though, the monster of a cooler of the Aorus Master should definitely keep it cooler than the relatively small FE card. It is disappointing. I believe their Eagle models of the 3060ti are a better value though with it performing as it should for a 2 slot 2 fan card.

8 minutes ago, MustafaXIX said:

ASUS TUF 3070

ASUS really outdid themselves with their TUF cards this generation, with performance basically on par with their much more expensive Strix models. It's impressive for an MSRP card. Not that MSRP is relevant in current market conditions.