EVGA posted a YouTube video several days ago advertising its new ICX cooling for RTX 3000 graphics card. Near the end of the video EVGA showcases a new update to the Precision X1 software, and in one of the slides you can see a heavy core and memory overclock on its RTX 3090 FTW3, and extreme edition of the GeForce RTX 3090. How heavy? The GPU core appears to be running at 2105 MHz, and the GDDR6X memory is maybe clocked at 22 Gbps.
Could this overclock be real or is it just marketing hype? For now we need to treat this news with a little skepticism and await confirmation. We can see earlier in the video (at the 1:28 mark) that the base GPU clock appears to be 1695 MHz, with the GDDR6X memory at 9750 MHz (double data rate, that's 19.5 Gbps), so those should be 'reference' clocks.
The next segment shows the overclocked core and memory speeds, except there are some oddities. The core shows 2105 MHz, but the memory shows 5520 MHz. That would mean either the memory was significantly underclocked (to 11 Gbps), or the multiplier on the RAM changed to 4x. Neither one makes a lot of sense, which makes us wonder if it's a typo.
A 400MHz core overclock for a modern GPU is very big ... but we don't actually know what the typical boost clock is for the RTX 3090. In the past, Nvidia has been quite conservative with boost clocks. The RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition for example has a boost clock of 1635 MHz, but routinely runs at 1800 MHz or more in games — without overclocking. In other words, a static clock of 2105 MHz might only be 100-200 MHz higher than the GPU normally runs.
It could be that EVGA underclocked the VRAM to give the GPU core more headroom. It could be a typo. It could be a lot of things. We haven't been able to test any RTX 30-series GPUs yet, so we'll have to wait until September 17 to see how the 3080 performs, and then another week to show the RTX 3090 numbers.
Ampere's performance gains could be spectacular for overclockers. Or they might end up being similar to what we've seen with Turing and Pascal. If EVGA is truly hitting a 410 MHz offset, that would be incredible and could mean 15-20% more performance than stock. Assuming the memory bandwidth doesn't end up limiting performance.
The RTX 3090 already looks like it will deliver incredible performance. Nvidia says it's 50% faster than the outgoing RTX 2080 Ti, though the theoretical TFLOPS is actually 165% higher. But memory bandwidth is only 52% higher and may be a limiting factor. Regardless, it's going to be interesting to see how far the average RTX 3090 will overclock once reviewers get their hands on these new GPUs. Stay tuned for our review of the RTX 3090 coming soon.
