ASUS RTX 3080 TUF OC Review & Tear-Down: Thermals, Noise, & Overclocking

military-grade capacitors and other tough components enhance durability and performance dual ball fan bearings can last up to twice as long as sleeve bearing designs the extra flatness allows for better contact with the die for improved thermal transfer capacitors that meet military grade certification make the tough stand tall amongst the competition so we're not really clear on what military grade means going back to that era of computers uh this is perhaps along the same lines as aircraft-grade aluminum also known as aluminum but either way we're reviewing the asus rtx 3080 tough today and despite some of its well over ambitious marketing the product is actually not that bad performance-wise just just a weird set of marketing choices for the newegg page on the product page but we're going to be reviewing the tough today and we're looking at the uh the flatness actually coincidentally that was brought up the mounting pressure the thermals the acoustics and overclocking performance among other things before that this video is brought to you by ek and the ekaio series we recently reviewed the ekaio drgb 360 as one of the top performers in our cpu cooler charts advantaged from its fan performance and high quality pump internals that we found during our tear down if you're looking for a high performance rgb cpu cooler with longer steady state times check out the ek aio 360 and 240 at the links in the description below so the asus tough is well it doesn't come like this but it's supposed to be a 700 card it's along the the same pricing tier as the gigabyte eagle and eagle's supposed to be 700 the fe is supposed to be 700 finding it's a different story but we're reviewing the cards as they're listed and then this content will obviously be useful to you if you're making a decision when one does come in stock so that you're prepared for when stock pops up knowing what you want to buy or what you might want to avoid we've already reviewed the gigabyte rtx 3080 eagle it's their low end sku as far as low end can be for 30 80s anyway the fe card has been thoroughly reviewed at this point and we're working on some others like the ftw3 and maybe the xc3 ultra at some point but for now we've got three main cards to look at we'll be focusing on the quality of life features as we call them so that's going to be acoustics noise normalized thermals which looks at the efficiency of a cooler design and ignores the fact that a any cooler could brute force the fans and achieve good thermals as a result of that so noise normalized thermals looking at the auto fan ramping speed if you do your use your gpu and auto which most people do we're testing that as well that's mostly the fan curve following a v bios temperature target at that point so we'll be determining that as well power consumption is in here overclocking's in here and gaming we're actually going to skip because it doesn't matter the difference from one partner model to the next is a couple fps at absolute best and when when we say a couple here it's in the literal sense of one to two fps average fps is most commonly what you're going to see so it's just not worth going through all of those charts to show what we can already predict and ultimately you're picking cards based on price warranty support accessibility whether you can actually buy it in other words accessibility in your region and then the noise profile power consumption cooling abilities stuff like that so that's the focus today we're also going to be doing a disassembly of the card hence why it is in this state all the testing was done before disassembly obviously we had to add thermal couples for some of it so the backlit was removed for that and you'll get to see some of our gripes with the assembly but overall the tough has surprised us considering the tough uh very poor history and gpus in the not too distant past so this has been an uplift for asus it looks like they're actually trying to come back and fix this line of gpus our first test will use noise normalized thermals which helps to adjust for fan speed and test efficiency of the coolers by controlling most of the variables in this instance normalizing for a given noise of 40 dba at a 20 inch distance and with a noise floor of 26 db allows us to eliminate advantages gained by just blasting the fan speeds unreasonably loud this levels the playing field but it doesn't control for power so we have to keep an eye on that we're still testing cards so this chart is thus far sparsely populated for gpu thermals the rtx 3080 fe ran warmest when normalized to 40 dba testing at 70 degrees celsius this was while running a lower total board power as well so that means it's considerably worse than the other two the two partner models because it's running lower power and it's also running hotter that's doubly true when considering the price equivalence of the eagle which is supposed to sell for about seven hundred dollars the tough is the best so far when noise normalized at 56 degrees celsius for the core versus 60.8 on the eagle and about 70 for the fe card vrm mosfet thermals measured on the pcb put us at 61 degrees on the asus card measured in the center of the left side vrm near the i o and the eagle in the same spot measured at 55 degrees celsius for gddr6x thermals the asus card tested at 54 degrees on the flip chip side of the board and the gigabyte card tested at 73 degrees and 65.8 degrees depending on which number you're looking at we had trouble getting this test to work successfully on the fe card so it's not present in this chart we'll next look at auto thermals these show the out of the box thermals so the fan can do whatever it wants showing rpm is pointless since the fans are different counts and sizes so we'll just put the noise level next to each entry this mostly shows the v bios target for temperature with the fans following that target the fe card runs at about 66 degrees celsius in this workload but maintains the loudest noise level at about 40 41.1 dba in this test the rtx 3080 eagle ran at 37 dba here noticeably quieter and at a slight reduction in core temperature but while also running 20 watts higher for power target the tough plotted 64.7 degrees celsius when set to quiet mode which had it at 33.5 dba this is highly efficient compared to both of the other coolers but it does run five degrees warmer than its own performance view bios where noise levels escalate to 37.7 dba in this particular power virus workload vrm mosfet thermals for the measured section of the vrm plotted 74 degrees on the eagle when left to auto control 61 degrees on the top with performance mode and 67 degrees on the top with quiet mode memory thermals were in the range of 54 to 61 degrees on the top and all of these results are well within the thermal spec for each of the components for the gigabyte and the tough cards so either of those two would be fine purely from a cooler standpoint ignoring extra features like dual v bios there's really no significant downside to either of these two coolers and both outperform the fv card this next chart shows the auto controlled noise as plotted against a real workload this is with all other system cooling using passive methods so only the gpu fans are making noise the noise floor is about 26 to 27 db the asus tough card's auto configuration has its fan ramping quickly comparable to the other cards and with relatively low hysteresis the curve settles after just 100 seconds and plots at about 38 dba the fe card peaks at 41 dba during its heaviest fan spike and then settles to about 39 to 40 dba the eagle card ran just under the asus card when both were auto configured plotting at 37.7 dba we'll next look at mounting pressure and the evenness of pressure across the surface of the 3080 tough car this test uses a chemical paper to detect pressure and a nist traceable scanner to produce a pseudo color image alongside a 3d bump map of the pressure just looking at the pressure map alone there's a lack of pressure on the right side towards the pcie power connectors on the card and particularly in the top right corner of the gpu this doesn't mean that there's no contact at all just that the pressure is too low here the gap would obviously be filled with paste but ultimately this is a weak point on asus's cooler and the overall performance could be better with more even pressure distribution across the silicon if we overlay the pressure map on the asus gpu die you'll see how poor the coverage is once out of the center and out of the lower left parts of the image for comparison we'll put some pressure maps up from our review of the rtx 3080 eagle and the founders edition cards just so you can see what it looks like on two other devices pressure doesn't indicate flatness or height of the service but it can point towards a potential issue with how level or how flat the surface is this test shows that service flatness of the coldplate as measured with a special instrument we test from a known and calibrated zero point and check for depth in microns the asus tough cooler plotted its quartiles in the range of 11 microns to 16 microns with the maximum measurement at 40 microns and the minimum at about three a tighter cluster here is better so the eagle cold plate is the best that we've tested thus far with this new approach wider measurements like the ones seen on the rtx 3080 fe are less desirable one-off spikes aren't too bad as long as they're just one-offs like in the eagles plot but running into enough of those spikes to widen the box indicates a problem the tough is overall good for flatness of the cold plate but is challenged for pressure so with these two data points what we know is that the issue isn't one of height or how even the cold plate is but one of where the screws are positioned and how they're tensioned time to look at frequency behavior of the cards tested in a looping 3d mark workload with a repeat frame render the tuff with its performance v bios averaged about 2001 megahertz throughout this test with spiking a result of the power limits the quiet v bios ran at 1978 megahertz primarily a result of the increased temperature from the reduced fan speeds so the trade-off is worth maybe a couple fps in most titles maximally but the noise reduction is likely more noticeable than that the next chart is intentionally zoomed to a range of a couple hundred megahertz this is to make things more legible comparatively the gigabyte eagle averages about 2 000 megahertz in the same workload tying with the asus tough and its performance v bios the founder's edition card plots about 1929 megahertz but has a further fall due to its higher operating temperature here's some quick charts to show power consumption across a few benchmarks the rtx 3080 tough with its performance v bios plotted 338 watts or 350 watts when manually overclocked its quiet v bios plotted within error of the stock performance number the eagle pulls 334 watts overclocked and stock as well because it doesn't offer any power increases via the slider and thus is the worse overclocker versus the top overall additional power means more headroom for overclocking but it becomes significantly less efficient as you try to ramp up the performance with each step on nvidia's ampere architecture power consumption and a gaming workload shows similar behavior the rtx 3080 tough plots around 3 338 to 339 watts without a manual oc or about 351 with an oc the 3080 fe bios still has a higher power target pushing to 367 watts this table is our own quick reference table for internal notes when we're overclocking a card this is tested with a different benchmark scene than the earlier frequency tests and so it's not directly comparable the asus tough ran at about 1935 megahertz when fully self-regulated in our looping time spy extreme gt1 benchmark a power increase alone with nothing else boosted that to about 1950 megahertz with core offsets proving mostly unstable represented by the f for failed demarcation in the far right column our final stable setting was a 60 megahertz offset and 1000 megahertz gddr6x offset as a reminder an offset for the core is versus a baseline so that'll fluctuate based on the load in terms of the final numbers that you get you shouldn't just copy the numbers if you want to buy one of these make sure you do the testing and the stepping on your own 1000 for memory proved barely stable and we'd probably have to drop it down to 880 to 920 megahertz offset for higher confidence and 24 7 stability its memory overclocks well but that's not because of the card or because of asus that's just chance the core didn't overclock very well at all on this one although some tests had it spiking to 20 25 megahertz the end average was closer to 1980 megahertz with the offsets applied again that's not directly comparable to the previous test but it's not particularly exciting either even versus this test for the other cards we're too limited on an amp here ultimately to get much more out of it without significant power boosts to the power limits that are in v bios finally for games as stated earlier we're not going to bother with showing game numbers for the partner models going forward because they're all going to be within 1 to 2 fps of each other for the most part so it's irrelevant you should be buying based on the quality of life features like efficiency acoustically the thermal performance maybe multiple view bios overclocking options or other things like simply price gaming at this point doesn't really matter once you've decided if you want a 3080 or 39 or whatever it may be because the performance is all going to be so close together that the only real differences will be in those earlier named features okay so now we're going to take apart the asus tough normally we often do these in standalone videos but for some of these reviews we're just coupling them in if it's not too complicated aboard so first of all this one has a comment on it again but the tire tread marks on the back which is weird kind of i don't know they're trying to say that it's tough so tough you can run over it i guess but uh not really very odd choice of branding but either way the disassembly is pretty easy it's this back plate you can look at it and already tell how it's assembled to the board because you can see these threads are facing the opposite way so there's screws going through the pcb into the back plate unfortunately the downside of that approach to design is that you can't just remove the back plate you have to take apart the whole thing to get the back plate off so that's a downside upside is a bit more support for a you'll see that there's an extra heatsink structure in there potentially more support for the card against sag but it is it is more obnoxious to disassemble as a result so we'll track these screws on the gn mod mat you can grab one of the mod mats on store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like their work surfaces for this type of stuff and we also sell the tool kits like the one i'm using on the store and they have all the tools you'll need to take apart in the very least this partner card but many others as well so these are actually technically i could have done these screws with a phillips one screwdriver which is more standard but these for the the spring tension screws for the retention plate are actually a phillips zero which is kind of abnormal it's a little bit smaller there's a tamper seal there i already took it apart for thermocouple placement so you can see that mark but i don't think it technically says warranty void if removed it's just a red circle so these asus likes to do this these are spring tensioned which is actually a good thing although very uncommon these screws are typically used for the gpu itself back before nvidia switch to the leaf spring that amd uses the i o plate does not need to come off for this so that's disconnected okay so here's the inside of the card the there are two cables connected one's gonna be i think for leds and one will be for fans might as well check what the fans are i actually haven't looked at that yet board's fairly simple the cooler also fairly standard but this plate here did really well for sapphire with its nitro design counter if the pulse used it but for the 5700xt nitro for sure they had a separate plate like this typically works pretty well so it's just additional fins mounted directly to the memory and part of the vrm over here you can see there's actually a heat pipe running through this stack so the benefit of this is that rather than technically syncing the gpu and the memory and part of the vrm all into the same copper cold plate where potentially you might drive the gpu thermals up a little bit it depends on how you know how the greater design works but you could drive gpu thermals up slightly because you're sharing a solution to cool the same thing this is normally more of a concern with closed loop liquid coolers like a 120 ml clc where you have a certain amount of water and heat capacity but either way having a separate set of heat sinks that can be accessed through the finstack the like parent fin stack via fans normally works pretty well and that's what we saw in our testing for the heat pipes you want as many of these to cross the silicon as possible so it looks like asus has one two three four that make pretty much full contact with the silicon and then there's partial contacts but these mostly just hit the rest of the plate on the outsides these are gonna be six ml heat pipes and they are copper heat pipes that are nickel plated if it weren't already obvious you can see a bit of copper right there to prove it there's a copper cold plate that is nickel plated and then over here you can see where the thermal pad is for the inductors so that's down over on this side on the board there's your inductor line this isn't super common the companies have started doing this more inductors run really hot but inside of an inductor housing it's literally just a coil of copper so they can run pretty hot it's not not uncommon for them to have a spec of around 150c but cooling it's certainly not bad it gets the heat away from the pcb which would otherwise be the primary path for that heat to go aside from sort of drafting off the top of it in terms of shunt resistors we've pointed these out on the other boards as well so might as well point them out here it's not like it used to be there's more than two now so you have five up here that will be for these two pcie headers if you want to do a shunt mod generally we'd recommend these days now that we've tried it doing a solid approach but you are physically modding the card you have to be careful you could damage something liquid metal is a little bit risky as well either way you don't gain too much for power but it tricks the power target into thinking it's consuming less than it is let's remove the back plate so to get that off we have to take these screws out they're going through the board into the back plate and then we'll look at the rest of the cooler and the fans so this is kind of interesting too i just noticed this this thermal pad is on top of the heatsink to the memory so it's actually memory thermal pad heatsink thermal pad heatsink which is very inefficient uh this might be a scenario where actually sharing the cold plate solution and sinking straight to the memory rather than going through an additional interface or two might have been a better approach but we don't have an a b way to test that to be fair also at this point asus's design does well enough where it's they don't need the extra performance we like to see maximize performance out of a design obviously but they they may have determined this was an easier path to go typically companies don't actually do a whole bunch of prototyping for these prior to a launch because of the tight timelines so it's unlikely they've tried all the things we're talking about probably just went with some standard design concepts that should free the back plate unless i missed one all right so this thermal pads on there too so back plate backup card you can see that there's a contact to the plate the actual metal of the plate not the plastic for the memory it's a little bit of extra surface area it's not finned or anything so you don't get a ton but uh we always want to see the back plate actually get used for something other than allegedly structural support and sinking some of the back components or even just the pcb into the plate it can certainly help a little bit these are extremely thin pads these look like a half mill pads and those are for the capacitors back here so those caps and those caps are contacting the very thin you're gonna go with half mil thermal pads might even be less than that but uh and then this is about a one mil thermal pad that's for the memory these are for the memory pretty simple stuff no wiring on the back no leds on the back there's a v bio switch and that's it okay so let's remove this piece i actually have not taken this off yet so we'll get to see if it's thermal putty or pads it is in fact it looks like one uniform piece yep so thermal pads for that these are the kind that get destroyed obviously we've got more of these if we need to replace them but uh so i wouldn't really you shouldn't need to take this off for anything unless you're doing a full like unless you're going with a water block or something because uh if you want to replace you can do that without taking this off which would recommend especially because the pads are the type that are more likely to get destroyed uh if you don't have backups laying around then you may want to leave that on it's very light piece of metal but looks like it's just aluminum fins pretty simple already explained how it works but the one heat pipe in there will help move the heat around especially away from the mosfets over here which is what that's contacting so you see that's that seats down like this that gives us contact to the monsters for this half of the vrm and then the rest of it's mostly cooling the memory okay let's take the let's take a fan off just to get a model number on that a couple of you have asked us to do this more often with tear downs because i was not aware of this but apparently these small form factor pc community really likes replacing fans for gpus so not something i've paid too much attention to but i guess you get potentially quieter ones if you do that these are technically phillips one head screws but i can't fit the driver in there uh so we're gonna go with the philip zero and just be careful one more so there's three total looks like there is something else holding it in it might be under the shroud which is very unfortunate if that's true okay that's annoying so this is asus should do a better job with this so this isn't just like a small form factor enthusiast niche request fan replacement is the only thing that a user should uh really be asking for in terms of what a ask you in terms of what they're going to ask company to make very easy for them the most common single point of failure on almost any computer component but especially gpus is fan death from either getting jams with dust over the years running too hot because it's jammed with dust or just chance uh fan that's the most common it should be as simple as one screw and then a socketable fan if they're not going to do a pin to pad thing maybe they're worried about contact over time or vibrational issues doing three screws and wires is okay but they should not be connected to a piece of plastic that is connected to the shroud like this to where we can't actually remove the fan so now if you're a user you don't have to actually take this off the board typically and i hope this remains true to get the fans replaced you should be able to just access it externally without even needing to worry about opening a card in this instance instance it looks like you'll at least have to open the shroud so there are three screws here i think you can still do all this without opening the card but it is uh it's extra steps that you start adding steps like this for a lot of users you start scaring them off and then it becomes weeks of rma hell for everybody involved it's a waste of money for asus because now their rma and their support departments are dealing with requests that were 100 preventable if they could just ship a user a fan and let them replace it so asus if you're listening i've just saved you money if you actually improve the design all right there's a shroud aluminum which is not really good in use but whatever led cable right there that's routed in a really annoying way so we're not going to take that out here's the culprit of our issue there's a screw inaccessible under the shroud which there's no reason that screw needs to be inaccessible or present okay same type of screw there's the fan so if you want to buy one or replace it if it dies 12 volt as always 0.45 amps is the spec and in terms of the exact model i try and read it champion is the brand with a suspiciously similar letter c to the other champion brand and the model is cf 901 u 1 2 d if you ever want to replace one this one not that it matters made in july of 2020. this is annoying too by the way so if you want to replace the fans it looks like you're gonna have to contend with this mess oh yeah okay so it's got a had a weird connector on it and you'll just have to remove this adhesive wrap and you'll be able to replace it so that'll be it for the tear down fairly simple in terms of the actual cooling solution pcb also fairly simple relative to the other 30 series pcbs we've seen so far fans can use improvement the way they're mounted but overall the cooler did pretty well in thermal testing so with the limited data set we have now it is technically in the lead in at least a few of those charts it could probably be a little bit better but hard to fault them too much when they are already leading gigabyte is very competitive though with its eagle card so that's it we have a lot more of these 3080s to test obviously but we kind of slowed down on it when the inventory was obviously not overflowing so we have a gaming x trio from msi coming up probably next we have an ftw3 we want to look at we've got a 3090 ftw3 review coming up as well but for now the asus tough is technically superior in some of these charts the gigabyte eagle is close enough that between the two of them sans a couple of things like overclocking support we're fine with either one if if you see one in stock and not the other and you want to just pull the trigger on something that's presumably seven hundred dollars either one would be a better choice on average than a founder's edition card founder's edition card can do a higher power uh target for overclocking which is potentially beneficial but the tough is somewhat likely to get custom v bios in the future and that is a potential positive if you dig around through forms you might find a more unlocked speed bios the eagle is very unlikely to get that kind of treatment eagle is not something we would recommend for anyone who's extremely interested in overclocking or competitive overclocking but it's fine for a stock out of box user experience this card's got a couple of other perks as well so it is easier to measure to take uh it's got checkpoints flagged on it as roman pointed out in one of his content pieces about the shunt mods and it's also got an evc2 connector for elmore's voltage controller also as roman pointed out so some upsides there if you're into overclocking uh but because of the power limits you will have to either hunt down an unlock speed bios if you really want to do some competitive work or you'll have to do some hard mods to it like shot resistor mods among other options so that's it for this one thanks for watching you can subscribe for more as always go to store.cambertexas.net to help us directly by funding this type of testing with product purchases you can get mod mats toolkits and more or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we'll see you all next time the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 361,224

Rating: 4.9159098 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, ASUS RTX 3080, asus rtx 3080 tuf, asus rtx 3080 tuf review, asus rtx 3080 tuf benchmarks, asus rtx 3080 tuf testing, asus rtx 3080 tuf vs gigabyte eagle, rtx 3080 eagle review, rtx 3080 founders edition review, best rtx 3080

Id: 7iGIiFfUwLs

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Jeffy29]

I have TUF and it's an overall fantastic card. I am a stickler for noise so this card is a godsend to me. After a good amount of testing, I settled at 1890Mhz at 850mV (quiet bios), with which I get about 98-99% performance of the max possible OC (fans running at 100%) and in games which fully utilize GPU, the card caps out at 72C and slightly audible. Though in 95% of games it's more 60-65C and fans inaudible (since you are going to be CPU bottlenecked or hit the framerate cap). And if you have case fans running slightly more, you are going to have even better results.

Though it has one downside that none of the reviewers mentioned. ASUS was dumb and set the threshold for fans activating at 30W so if you have high refresh rate monitor and/or multi-monitor setup, the GPU is going to draw ~35W even idle in windows, meaning fans will still be running. My GPU is right now literally at 31C and fans are still running (and you can't fix it with custom fan curve). Fans are very very quiet so it's not big deal if you are not a stickler for noise and are in a dead silent room. Hopefully, Asus will update their bios.

edit: I should also mention that before TUF I had Ventus (that I returned) and at 1890Mhz@843mV (it had better silicon), the card got quite audible when heavily stressed and at 74-75C it started downclocking a bit, though that was more likely to happen in Kombustor than real games. I actually preferred 1800Mhz@806mV which made it pretty quiet, though not as quiet as TUF on 850mV, which is why the card impressed me so much. Also Ventus fans were not really effective until 70C (default fan profile), while TUF just keeps the card at low 60C in most games while being inaudible. Ventus is by no means a bad card, just if you have a choice, this one beats it.

[u/slopokdave]

Tech Jesus hath spoken.

!!!!!!!MILITARY GRADE!!!!!!!

Keep up the good work and honesty, Steve.

[u/Articledan]

Very nice. NOW START SHIPPING THEM GODDAMIT 😄

[u/Bodooken]

I just want to see FTW3 review :(

[u/AromaticRobot]

Well okay, It seems that many of you guys think that Military grade in components is just a marketing thing, but this isn't really the case. ie. for capacitors to get military grade they have to pass certain specifications which are usually more strict than industrial grade. It's called military grade only because the specifications and limits for acceptance are cotrolled by U.S department of defense. You can look at these specifications by yourself at everyspec, for ceramic and dielectric capacitors the specification is: MIL-PRF-123-E (latest revision). "This specification covers the general requirements for high reliability, general purpose (BX and BR) and temperature stable (BP and BG) ceramic dielectric fixed capacitors, leaded and nonleaded for space, missile, and other high reliability applications." I mostly use MIL grade components at work just mainly because older CMOS chips what i have used have higher tolerance for high temperatures and overvoltages which isn't uncommon at older powerplant and factories. But for putting these military grade (MIL) capacitos at consumer level electronics may be just for getting the marketing rights. But for those who didn't know, Military Grade components are usually more sought after at industrial appliances where a component failure may cost tens or hundreds of thousands in losses of production.

[u/ShadowLinkX9]

Pretty surprised to see that despite the investment NVIDIA has made in their cooling, AIB designs still perform better. I guess size (of your heatsink) does matter.

[u/rjson]

I'm at work and can't watch this right now.
What's the bottom line? "Not that bad"?
I see people criticizing on the military-grade (overpriced) components used for the card

[u/leospeedleo]

So I was right in buying one of these to simply put it into my PC, everything on Auto and start playing.

So... yeah...when it arrives eventually.

[u/Reaperxvii]

I'll be curious how Nividia swapping from Samsung 8nm node to TSMC's 7nm node next year will effect these cards.

Since ampere is getting swapped over.