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Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition Overclocking
As always, overclocking involves trial and error, and results are not guaranteed. We attempt to dial in stable settings while running some stress tests, but what at first appears to work just fine may crash once we start running through our gaming suite.
We started by maxing out the power limit, which in this case was only 110%. Higher clocks were able to complete some tests, but we eventually settled in at a +200 MHz GPU core clock and +1500 MHz (25.4 Gbps effective) memory clock. We also set a custom fan speed that ramps from 30% at 30C up to 100% at 80C, though we never approached 80C in testing.
As with the RTX 4090, there's no way to increase the GPU voltage short of doing a voltage mod (not something we wanted to do), which seems to be a limiting factor. We did get above 3 GHz in some of our initial testing, and with our final overclock, we saw clocks in the high 2.9 and low 3.0 GHz range. We'll include our overclocking results for 1440p and 4K in our charts.
Nvidia RTX 4080 Test Setup
We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022, and we continue to use the same hardware for now. Nvidia recommends using an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K to further remove CPU bottlenecks… but I don't have one of those yet. (We're working on getting one for an updated GPU testbed.) We do enable XMP for a modest performance boost, and if you're actually going to go out and buy an RTX 4080 or 4090, it's at least worth considering a full PC upgrade.
Our CPU sits in an MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard with DDR4-3600 memory — a nod to sensibility rather than outright maximum performance. We also upgraded to Windows 11 and are now running the latest 22H2 version (with VBS and HVCI disabled, as well as the latest patches) to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. You can see the rest of the hardware in the boxout.
We used Nvidia-provided 526.72 pre-release drivers for the RTX 4080. Most of the other cards, including the RTX 4090, were tested with earlier drivers, though we did retest a few games with the same 526.72 drivers where we saw performance oddities (i.e., the 4080 shouldn't outperform the 4090).
Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it) and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We've tested the RTX 4080 at all of our normal settings, though the focus here will be squarely on 4K and 1440p performance.
We tested at 1080p, which might be slightly more meaningful on the 4080 than on the 4090, but CPU limits definitely come into play. We also enabled and tested the RTX 4080 with DLSS 2 Quality mode at 1440p and 4K in the games that support it — two of which (Forza Horizon 5 and Flight Simulator) currently show no benefit and can actually have reduced performance. That's because the games are already hitting CPU limits, something DLSS 3 sort of overcomes.
As we did in the RTX 4090 Founders Edition review, we also tested DLSS 3 and total system latency in several games. The DLSS 3 tests will be limited to RTX 40-series GPUs, and we'll have to eventually look at retesting once final builds become available.
Finally, besides the gaming tests, we have a collection of professional and content creation benchmarks that can leverage the GPU. We're using SPECviewperf 2020 v3, Blender 3.30, OTOY OctaneBenchmark, and V-Ray Benchmark.
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