1080 Strix Power Issue

[Halstin]

Hi all,

 

This is my first ever post on these forums, apologies in advance if I do anything wrong.

 

I just recently purchased an Asus Strix GTX 1080 graphics card and I am having a problem that I haven't seen anyone report as of yet. While overclocking, the card will start out at what I set it at, which is 2039 mhz, but it will quickly throttle down to 2012, then 1987, then 1974, where it levels out. It will maintain a 1974 clock, but no higher than that. This is not a thermal issue, the temperatures are great on this card. It goes no higher than 68c. I have the sliders for voltage and power percentage maxed out and the problem is that it starts hitting the 120% pretty quickly and the voltage (and core clock), will drop several times from the 1.093 cap all the way down to 1.025 to keep the card from going over the 120%. Nothing I do remedies this in any way, I have even used the voltage/frequency curve editor on the MSI Afterburner 4.3 beta. The only way I have been able to get the voltage to stay high enough to maintain a higher core clock is by actually underclocking the cards memory.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Strix would have a higher TDP because of the 8+6 pin vs the Founders Edition 8 pin power. I'm wondering if there is possibly something wrong with the power delivery of this card. Is this something that I should be worried about and should I send it back? It seems strange to me that it is bashing itself against that 120% power limit so readily.

[manikyath]

strix cards arent very good overclockers, and seemingly the 1080 is no change to this.

 

also, as jayztwocents pointed out in one of his videos, those extra pins do surprisingly little in terms of OCing headroom.

[AresKrieger]

Extra power doesn't matter since the chips have a max threshold around 2150 regardless and that is only if you win the silicon lottery, if you don't 2000ish seems to be common

[Halstin]

I guess that makes sense. As I've done more testing this morning, I've realized that The Witcher 3 is the only game that really causes a lot of throttling. Doom sits around 2000 core clock after some minor throttling. The performance is still on par with other 1080's as far as benchmarks are concerned, so I guess it's not really causing any issues beyond not being able to hit higher clocks. Also, from what I've seen, even if you can hit higher clocks it's only going to add a few frames.

 

Thanks for your replies!

[Hunter-97-G]

It's weird. If I remember correctly the Strix 1080 already has an agressive boost clock of 1936, and I've heared users getting 2000+ on stock based on GPU Boost 3 alone. So it seems that your chip can't overclock for sh*t. Now you should decide if you're ok with the performance you are getting, if not, return it and cross fingers for the next one to be a decent overclocker. I can't seem to get more than 2076 Mhz out of mine, which seems to be the average OC, and I'm fine with it.

[Halstin]

8 minutes ago, Hunter-97-G said:

It's weird. If I remember correctly the Strix 1080 already has an agressive boost clock of 1936, and I've heared users getting 2000+ on stock based on GPU Boost 3 alone. So it seems that your chip can't overclock for sh*t. Now you should decide if you're ok with the performance you are getting, if not, return it and cross fingers for the next one to be a decent overclocker. I can't seem to get more than 2076 Mhz out of mine, which seems to be the average OC, and I'm fine with it.

Yeah, that's why I was concerned about this one. Just bad luck I guess. I've also heard of issues with temps due to bad thermal paste and whatnot. This one has fantastic temps though. The problem is if I return it, the likelihood of me getting another one to replace it rather than just a refund are pretty much slim to none. Also, it's basically like flipping a coin on whether or not you'll get one that will do any better, or not have some kind of other issue. Guess I'll just have to deal with it being a bad overclocker.

[Hunter-97-G]

3 minutes ago, Halstin said:

Yeah, that's why I was concerned about this one. Just bad luck I guess. I've also heard of issues with temps due to bad thermal paste and whatnot. This one has fantastic temps though. The problem is if I return it, the likelihood of me getting another one to replace it rather than just a refund are pretty much slim to none. Also, it's basically like flipping a coin on whether or not you'll get one that will do any better, or not have some kind of other issue. Guess I'll just have to deal with it being a bad overclocker.

Really, you would only want to get +2Ghz if you want 60fps at 4K in newest games. If you're running 1440p or such, it'll be great.

[Halstin]

1 minute ago, Hunter-97-G said:

Really, you would only want to get +2Ghz if you want 60fps at 4K in newest games. If you're running 1440p or such, it'll be great.

Yeah, I'm on a 1440p, 144hz, g-zync, all that. It chews up and spits out pretty much everything at 1440p, so I can't really complain too much. The graphics score on Firestrike was around 24100, which is pretty much on par with other scores I've seen.