Is the GTX 1080ti watercooling a good investment?
Is the GTX 1080ti watercooling a good investment?
I bought an Asus Strix GTX 1080ti OC last week. While tweaking Afterburner, I realized I could only reach O/C at 75MHz, regardless of the voltage settings (power and temperature controls are maxed). However, during gameplay, I observed a stable average of around 2015MHz at 55°C. From what I see online, that’s quite impressive. Before purchasing the card, I intended to install a watercooler for better performance, but so far, based on what I’ve found, I probably won’t gain much more value. It seems unlikely I’ll reach +200MHz unless I upgrade further. Anyone else have thoughts?
Don't waste time cooling it down. With today's chips, you're not really at thermal limits, and you'd never get the most value from it.
If you wish to reduce the temperatures, feel free to discuss it during a full cover session using a custom loop or an AIO cooler with a bracket. Just remember the card has its own temperature limits set by NVidia, and only the K|NGP|N Edition cards from EVGA and possibly the HOF cards from Galax are expected to run hotter.
Lutfij :
If you want to lower the temps of the card then by all means, be my guest to watercool it(via a full cover block and a custom loop or an AIO cooler and a bracket) but please keep in mind that the card itself has a threshold and was put in place by NVidia. The only cards that will clock higher will be the K|NGP|N Edition cards by EVGA and I'm speculating the HOF cards by Galax.
On the most strenuous of activities, what sort of temps are we looking at? We will need your full system's specs to better gauge the airflow and the rest of your components. List them as:
CPU(&CPU cooler):
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
Chassis:
Core i7 6850K @ 4.4GHz AIO watercooled (gaming, temp is around 40*C)
4x8GB DDR4 RAM @ 3000
MSI X99A SLI Plus
Samsung M.2 512GB SSD
Asus STRIX GTX 1080ti OC +75MHz core, +400MHz RAM, boosts to about 2000+, rarely dips, and between 50*C-55*C
playing on three 46" TVs, surround mode.
I was planning on getting another 1080ti, maybe around Black Friday or Boxing Day, and then a liquid cooling system. But all benchmarks I find on liquid cooling are between 2000MHz and 2100MHz. I have good temps already, so it doesn't look like I'm stuck on that point. when I try for 100MHz, my card fails on Heaven Benchmark
Gave up playing Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 for the night and considered checking out BIOS updates for the 1080Ti. Found some useful links so far.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments...vidia_gtx/
http://www.overclock.net/t/1627212/how-t...ur-1080-ti
The pages seem to connect to each other regarding BIOS changes.
Added question. Does the Core Voltage setting not affect Afterburner? I managed to unlock it for the Ti, but it feels strange that once unlocked, a completely new BIOS isn't necessary for all that effort.
the core voltage% enables your card to operate faster under stress while generating more heat. i’ve been adjusting my overclock for three days now, mostly sticking to the default factory setting because it’s sufficient for achieving 60fps at 4k in the games i play. even with clocks set at 2088/6150, the improvement is only 5-8 fps, which doesn’t seem worth the effort. the gap between high and ultra settings at 4k is also quite noticeable. my suggestion is to test performance in the games you use and only overclock if necessary.
So, going through some articles and adjusting a few settings (just about 30 minutes), I realized that overclocking these cards is quite different from previous ones. Even with the Afterburner fix to unlock the voltage slider, NVidia sets a fixed voltage for each clock speed. So changing the slider doesn’t really help much. You should look at the graph and tweak the power points for certain stages. I managed to raise it from 2000MHz to 2050MHz, but then it dropped to 2034 due to thermal throttling (which is why I didn’t spend too long on it).
I’m wondering if anyone with a liquid cooled 1080ti has tried this method or followed the usual overclocking process. If my card is already boosting to 2050MHz in air before throttling, it makes me think there might be more potential with better cooling.
Mac_angel you're referring to is just Boost 3.0 with all Pascal cards. The main change for the 1080ti is the larger chip, which needs more voltage. Overclocking isn't as high due to the 1.093v lock-off.
I'm interested in hearing from anyone who owns a liquid cooled 1080ti. Did they experiment with this setup or follow the usual overclocking methods? If my card reaches 2050MHz on air before it throttles up, I’m wondering if liquid cooling could unlock more potential for me. My 1080Ti isn’t liquid cooled, but I’ve installed an aftermarket cooler (ARCTIC Accelero Xtreme III). It keeps the temperature at 2063 until around 50°C and then starts to slow down. Impressed with this cooler though—it completely ruined the WindForce 3x GPU cooler on my 1070 and cools my 1080ti quietly.
Before upgrading the cooling, I couldn’t keep anything above 1989MHz. I use the sliders to adjust my card’s speed. From what I’ve seen, 2100MHz is possible with premium water, careful curve tuning, and a BIOS with a higher power limit. Whether it’s worth it depends on you—it’s just a few extra frames at most.
I’m thinking about adding water to my rig so I can keep my overclock stable and reduce the air conditioning costs during the summer heat. To be honest, this is more about me handling heat and water cooling than boosting GPU performance.
Maybe a silly question, but have you checked with CPU-Z to see what’s really limiting your card?