Performance Benchmarks Under LN2
Once we finished with our preparation and sorting, we only had a little LN2 left. That was enough to run a handful of benchmarks:
The first test was Fire Strike Extreme. We took advantage of the card's warm-up phase to run this one, achieving a score of 18,034 points in the graphics test with the GPU at 2518 MHz and the RAM at 1624 MHz.
For the next test, we also overclocked our Core i9-7900X on an MSI X299 Xpower Gaming AC motherboard in order to maximize the overall score.
Similar to our Fire Strike test, we were able to stabilize the GDDR5X at 1624 MHz. In truth, this value was used because it's the highest one that Afterburner can apply. It's possible that the card is at its limit, but MSI hasn't yet responded to our request for an extended frequency range.
As for the GPU, we tried applying a new thermal paste to lessen the effects of degradation we were seeing. But the result was disappointing. Even worse, we were not able to reproduce the 2570 MHz seen during our ranking phase. Instead, we hit a ceiling of 2556 MHz. That's still pretty good. As of this writing, only two other GeForce GTX 1080 Tis in the world have done better.
This test allowed us to push up to 2632 MHz. The CPU and memory didn't factor into our score this time. Instead, their frequencies were lowered in order to conserve our precious liquid nitrogen.
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