1080 TI FE. Pretty good

[Brando]

I finally cracked and picked up an evga 1080ti FE from frys. they matched neweggs price which was nice and i only had to drive 10 min instead of waiting for shipping. yeah i'm weak but i needed to know how the FE does and spending the extra $ for a tiny difference doesn't sit well. i used the savings to grab a deathadder elite and splurged on a fancy new mousepad for it. so far i think i'm fine with reference. sure it does make more noise on load and you lose a few mhz but the real world compromise feels almost insignificant and all the hot air goes bye bye from the case. mine gets to 1923 mhz steady in heaven at 1080 res and about 55% fan speed which isn't really bugging me. the idle noise was my main concern and i don't really hear it from inside my fractal r5. i haven't heard any coil whine yet. so far so good and fingers crossed. if i end up changing my mind i'll just step up to a ftw3 with dual bios and flash it. 2600-2800rpm on the stock fan is more than a gentle breeze but definitely no leaf blower.

 

[Alaric]

Sounds like you made a good choice. The main indicator being you're happy with it. And you can always OC, 'cuz, well, this is OCF. LOL If you feel the need to upgrade, Galx's HOF series are great cards, and you can download the Limited Edition BIOS, which raises clocks. Trust me, it works nicely.

 

[Brando]

Sounds like you made a good choice. The main indicator being you're happy with it. And you can always OC, 'cuz, well, this is OCF. LOL If you feel the need to upgrade, Galx's HOF series are great cards, and you can download the Limited Edition BIOS, which raises clocks. Trust me, it works nicely.

hopefully i don't end up smacking myself in the head after the amp extreme comes out but if the strix is any indication then the extra money will only get an extra 100-150mhz which comes out to a couple frames in 4k for 12% more money. if i get buyers remorse i can always step up or get the 1080 water cooler which will give way better temps than any aftermarket heatsink. the gpu doesn't seem to be limited by power delivery from what i've seen so far. at the end of the day the fan is almost drowned out by moderate sound from speakers and bf1 in 4K ultra at 65-100 fps in a 64 player match is fantastic. usually sits around 70-80 fps and feels like butter.

edit: oh yeah and facing my side fan inwards while also having a blower style vga cooler seems to have dropped cpu temps a good amount. i'm having a hard time getting it up to 70c with realbench stress test. was eventually climbing to 79c before. i don't know which thing did it.i think it's probably a bit of both

 

[Alaric]

Yeah, my max clocks (1262 so far) seem to be the same no matter which BIOS I use and cooling hasn't been a problem yet. I think the Pascal chips will do all they can do pretty easily no matter whose platform they're on, and they seem to be pretty close to max velocity out of the box. I picked mine based on past HOF performance, and it's pretty. It's still pretty, so I'm happy.

 

[Brando]

like you said, happiness is what matters. i miss the "old" days when there was more oc headroom but i guess it's cool that they're optimizing better and giving people most of a products potential out of the box. i just don't feel as much like i'm getting away with something now. still, even if overclocking becomes boring it's fun to pick good components and make a pc.

 

[Brando]

this seems to be the best case scenario with this chip without flashing the bios. running the fan at max just to take temps out of the equation. noise level is obviously not liveable.

 

[Alaric]

You're memory runs at 5508? What's the stock speed? I had mine at 4475 and thought I was pushing it, since I know next to nothing about OC memory.

 

[Brando]

You're memory runs at 5508? What's the stock speed? I had mine at 4475 and thought I was pushing it, since I know next to nothing about OC memory.

11ghz is stock speed on the ti. they made corny spinal tap jokes about turning it up to 11 etc. i still want to tweak it but i'm going one thing at a time. here's where the card seems to want to settle when i work backwards from 100% fan speed and voltage cranked and lowering it down slowly. not too shabby.

EDIT: nevermind couldn't make it through a whole round of bf1. gonna roll with 1975mhz and a lower voltage/fan and call it a day if it sticks. silence is golden.

 

[Woomack]

Regardless what GX1080Ti you get, if it won't have higher power limit then all will OC about the same. Strix in reviews is so far the same or worse than FE. The same will be with any other card which has higher TDP and not much higher power limit.
My EVGA 1080Ti FE is overclocking up to 2012MHz. It looks like typical OC. Still in some benchmarks I see it's passing power limit ( after overvoltage ) and clock is going down by 20-30MHz. Power limit in GPU-Z after overvoltage is ~124%. Without voltage changes I see it's asking for higher voltage to OC/boost higher.

 

[Brando]

Regardless what GX1080Ti you get, if it won't have higher power limit then all will OC about the same. Strix in reviews is so far the same or worse than FE. The same will be with any other card which has higher TDP and not much higher power limit.
My EVGA 1080Ti FE is overclocking up to 2012MHz. It looks like typical OC. Still in some benchmarks I see it's passing power limit ( after overvoltage ) and clock is going down by 20-30MHz. Power limit in GPU-Z after overvoltage is ~124%. Without voltage changes I see it's asking for higher voltage to OC/boost higher.

the evga ftw3 looks like it has a decent chance of being better. if it can fit a 1080 hydro kit you can flash the bios and give it volts without worries since it has a backup bios and temps will be amazing. then again the cooler it comes with might be enough. they seem to be pretty proud of it. i'll wait to see what people are doing with them and will consider it if they can do 2200mhz + with a flash. i doubt it.

 

[Woomack]

So far the only results at 2150+ are on fully modded .. FE. Looking at 1080 and Titan I wouldn't expect any much better results on non-reference cards. Maybe there will be something good, hard to say. I just hope there will be bios which is unlocking power rails and power limit ... maybe some voltage too. I have noticed that Strix is in theory better ... but card has much higher TDP than FE so at the end OC potential is about the same even though it has better power section. On TPU it was well described.
EVGA so far will have only FTW which will be better than FE ( I mean PCB/power delivery, not cooler ). Maybe will be Classified in some time but even FE was way too expensive for me and I have no idea why I decided to buy it. Considering differences on local market between GTX1080 I expect FTW to cost about $150 more than FE and Classified about $250 more.
Even FE is great so I'm not complaining. Card is quiet ... as long as it's not overclocked. After unlocking power limit and some voltage it hits 90°C. I also think that drivers are causing some issues with OC. On Win7 I have different boost than on Win10. Also max core clock is lower on Win7 ... but memory is lower on Win10. Maybe OS has some issues as it's acting a bit weird sometimes. Like on Win10 everything is fully stable except 3DMark Time Spy. Only in this test it's crashing when I set 2012MHz and it's not like visual error or driver crash, it's simply quitting test with general error without description.

 

[Brando]

are people cranking the voltage and power limit all the way or do we need to be careful? when i go past 73% voltage is starts turning danger red on the slider.

 

[Woomack]

It's barely any difference. Stock is 1.06V max, after setting it to the max it's about 1.095V. Up to 1.15-1.20V should be safe on ambient temps if cooler is good enough. If you aren't sure what is safe then there is always about 10% headroom regardless what component it is ... of course when temps are reasonable.
However when you set higher voltage then in more demanding tests/games card will throttle as power limit is too low. As I said in my last post, I've seen 124% in some tests when max is 120% on stock BIOS.

 

[Brando]

i bet she can make it with a water cooler and max voltage/power limit. i need about 2700mhz to run rise of tomb raider at 60fps on 4k ultra.

 

[R_Pierce]

i bet she can make it with a water cooler and max voltage/power limit. i need about 2700mhz to run rise of tomb raider at 60fps on 4k ultra.

with any luck, this weekend I will be able to get mine setup and under water. I plan on doing the shunt mod also.

 

[Woomack]

Here is MSI GTX1080Ti Gaming review and OC is even worse than on Strix https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1080_Ti_Gaming_X/33.html

Somehow I don't like the idea of using CLP to short resistors. I had weird issues with CLP in the past and I just don't trust it, especially on so expensive graphics card. I would faster just solder thin wire but my soldering skills are not the best and almost everything looks weird ( usually works but looks weird ).
Someone was reporting that flashing higher TDP graphics card BIOS is helping. On the other hand all that for ~50MHz higher OC ?