Extensive report hints at overclocking potential of Nvidia’s latest cards
WePC is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Anyone seeking to get the absolute maximum performance out of their components will be familiar with overclocking, a process of running your components at higher speed than officially supported out of the box, to push your performance beyond what would be possible at stock speeds. The exact degree to which any given graphics card can be overclocked will vary depending on multiple factors, including your power supply, cooling solutions, and the silicon lottery where luck of the draw will result in outwardly identical cards having different capacities for overclocking.
The exact process of overclocking a graphics card is a reasonably complex procedure, with scope for damaging your card if you aren’t careful. We’ve put together an extensive guide to walk you through it step by step. You may want to familiarize yourself with this process if you’re excited about the upcoming 30 Series GPUs from Nvidia, given these reports we’re seeing today.
Videocardz.com are today reporting that their sources have shown that the Nvidia Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 3080 supports TDPs of up to 370W, which would equate to a 50w increase on the default 320w TDP it ships with. This kind of power increase equates to a memory speed increase from 19 Gbps to 20.5 Gbps. A nice jump if you’re interested in going through the overclocking process, but it does perhaps suggest that the GPU memory is consuming a fair bit of power despite on paper being more efficient than GDDR6. They say that these results are not based on fully comprehensive testing and that they need to further examine how the cards work in real-world conditions before being absolutely certain.
Early indications from this report are that the first wave of AIBs, cards manufactured by Nvidia’s various partners, do not yet support higher TDPs, so the extent to which they can be overclocked is limited. Perhaps later more fully custom-designed PCBs will be able to support higher TDP limits, but early indications here are that avid overclockers will perhaps want to opt for a Founders Edition card direct from Nvidia. We’ll know more details for sure once we get our hands on these cards, so keep an eye out for our coverage of these new GPUs as we approach launch. It could potentially be the case that AIBs will have support for higher TDP limits added via a driver update, a flaw in these early testing methodologies, or simply that early pre-production units aren’t representative of final performance.
There are more early details available in the Videocardz.com report, so check it out in full if you want to see what their sources are telling them about Nvidia’s GeForce 30-series GPUs, but we won’t get the full picture of what to expect from these cards until down the line.
