EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra Review: Thermals, Overclocking, Noise, Power, & XOC Records

today we're reviewing the ebj rtx 3080 ftw3 ultra gaming it's got a lot of words in the name so that means it's better this is a card we actually had the original 3080 ftw3 ultra gaming when the 3080s launched the partner models but ours had the six capacitors on the back ultimately this was mostly an issue solved with drivers if you're not familiar with the story we won't bother getting into it because it's all been resolved now but now we have the four capacitor model just in case there were any actual differences that mattered so reviewing the 3080 ftw3 today we have a specific focus on noise normalized and power normalized thermals because the car draws more power than most of the other 3080s by design that gives it a bit more headroom for frequency when overclocking and got it into world record position in some of our benchmarks previously so that's what we're reviewing today before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake's core p3 case the core p3 is one of the most unique cases on the market it can serve as an open air standing chassis a test bench in vertical or horizontal orientation or as a wall mounted showcase pc the core p3 now comes with a five millimeter thick tempered glass panel for its side but keeps the front top and back open for air you can learn more at the link in the description below getting into it then the 3080 ftw3 first of all it's about 810 it's one of the most expensive we've reviewed thus far in the 3080 family it is again a higher power limit bios at about 380 watts there's also a 450 watt v bios out there if you want to flash that on there and then do more extreme overclocking with it we've tested that as well and we actually have a couple of streams but the for overclocking the f23 that we worked with actually this one here with the six caps was our world record card we achieved very high ranks with just air cooling and then we pushed it uh well past two gigahertz with liquid nitrogen so performance wise for for overclocking we haven't had an issue with the six or the four cap versions but either way it's expensive and it's that v bios that also allows you to do it which does increase the the heat load that you have to cool with the cooler because well the power consumption's higher uh by design because the v bios is programmed to have a higher power consumption and that's something really want to drive this home today is that testing thermals for a gpu it's not just like a fire strike number that comes out and that's the score it depends on a lot of things like again power but also the v bios temperature target whatever that number is that's what the fans will follow to try and maintain on the gpu core so the fan curve will match to the v bios temperature target and then you also have a few things in there like hysteresis of the fan stuff like that so we'll be talking about that we'll also show a quick teaser image of the pseudo color for this board so this image we'll talk about more in a moment but the pseudo-color pressure map you're looking at is from the ftw3 it has some of the best contacts we've seen thus far out of the 3080 cards so we're gonna be talking about that more in a little bit but let's get into the testing we've got a lot to go through for thermals we'll be talking about the icx sensors what those mean uh if they're just a gimmick or if they have some actual use and then going through some of the cooler design and overclocking we finished our evga rtx 3090 fcw3 review about a week ago or two actually but we haven't aired it yet due to other content going live first in that piece though you'll see a section about thermistor reliability on the icx cards evgx cards that claim quote icx technology in marketing are really talking about their use of ntc thermistors on the pcb which we showed back in the acx to icx transition as being accurate ntc thermistors are not special and evga didn't invent them so the good news is that they're a reliable understood technology that's existed for a long time it's just a thermal sensor that's placed on the board placed near the components and it has some level of patenting surrounding it for evga's technologies we have a shot of the evj board layout that shows the placement of these thermal sensors we can put that on the screen you can see where there are a couple of memory sensors typically it's three and then some power sensors typically five with one additional gpu temperature sensor towards the back side of the gpu so there should be nine sensors total in that 3090 ftw 3 chart though which is coming up in a separate review we show that the thermistors are a good indicator of performance as compared to our usual thermocouple method we'll show that one again here because it's the same result this chart from the 3090 ftw3 shows how the gpu power ntc thermistor is run about 63 to 77 degrees celsius with only one erroneous spike beyond the temperature of the sun as a result of a precision x1 monitoring bug our teal blue vrm line shows our own measurement taken with a thermocouple which happens to align with the average of the evga sensors so that's a good thing that means we can trust the evga sensors as being accurate the memory thermals were similar we plotted the ntc thermistors on the 3090 variant we'll get back to the 3080 in a second at an average of about 67 to 69 degrees celsius on that board which is flanked by our own top and bottom gddr6x thermocouples the icx sensors are mostly a gimmick but they can be very useful to a specific audience namely if you're going to water cool the card or especially if you're going to do extreme overclocking it eliminates all questions about whether you have adequate cooling and coverage of the various significant components of the board it's not very useful for plug and play use or plug and play audiences aside from maybe being a neat thing to look at when you first plug it in and then forget about for the rest of the card's life but it does have uses it's just not too widespread time to talk about the rtx 3080 ftw3 now so finally the 3080. we're starting with the most important metric which is noise normalized thermals this tells us whose cooler is the most effective by controlling the noise level to 40 dba at 20 inches with a 26 db noise floor this prohibits coolers from simply blasting fan speed to achieve the best number on a chart but there's still one more point that needs control for a truly like for like measurement power the v bios of each card allows it to draw power up to a limit customized by the manufacturer in this instance the eagle and tough cards were both about 336 watts now mind you this is a different number than i'll be showing later in the power consumption charts for reasons we'll explain in the power consumption charts but the fe card here was showing 316 watts in actuality they're closer to 340 and 320 it's also the highest power consumption that makes it less fair of a comparison the top measured at 56 degrees out doing the fe by a large margin while at a higher power budget and the eagle was within about four degrees of the tough so they both did well manually bringing the ftw 3 down to about the same power consumption got us to 64.7 degrees celsius the duff cooler remains superior here even when power normalized and noise normalized in the same test here's the memory in mosfet thermals the 3080 ftw3 at about the same power as the top still ran warmer on memory thermals not that it really matters at this point while running about the same for mosfet thermals the memory doesn't gain anything from running cooler unlike core and just needs to be distant from tj maxx which is 110 degrees celsius the 3080 ftw3 at 377 watts ran five degrees celsius higher on the fet and about five to six degrees celsius higher on the memory the eagle ran worse for memory thermals as compared to the rest but is still well within spec this next chart shows the out of the box thermals again we really can't emphasize enough how much this is basically a test of whatever number the manufacturer typed into v bios the noise normalized and power normalized testing helps show the actual cooler efficacy and efficiency while this shows how the coolers are able to manage the preset temperature target in a controlled environment the dba number next to each cooler shows what noise level it sustained when at steady state and that's as the only noise producer in the system nothing else makes noise in the computer and it's measured at 20 inches with a noise floor of 26 db showing the gpu only the evga rtx 3080 fcw3 plots in the center with its ocv bios at 66 degrees celsius that's with a board power of about 380 watts and a noise level of about 43 dba that has it about the same as the 3080 fe except at 60 watts higher power consumption and at 2 decibels 2 dba higher noise the asus tough with silent v bios is a technical leader of the ftw3 at 65 degrees celsius although deals with 40 watts less power and that is in turn led by the gigabyte eagle except the eagle runs at 3.5 dba higher the tough with its higher speed v bios leads all cards but remains at 336 watts you can see how these charts are only useful as long as you're careful about studying all the aspects because out-of-the-box use is inherently uncontrolled and v-bios is really what you're looking at when you look at that temperature number the good news is that this is still representative of how most people use the cards and we've collected all the necessary points for you to determine which is the best for you this next chart shows the vrm mosfet and gddr6x temperatures in the same testing as the previous chart as measured with manually placed probes except in an auto test environment g6x1 is located at the top while g6x2 is located near the slot the mosfats on these boards all can handle in excess of 100 degrees celsius although it's obviously ideal to be as low as possible each of them does fine here the eagle is the weakest performer for mosfet thermals in our testing but it's still doing well our mosfet measurement is on the hottest vet that we could quickly locate on the card which is typically on the side near the i o the evga 3080 ftw 3 runs 62 degrees for g6x and 64 for the vrm placing it in the middle of everyone so far none of these is what we consider bat the fe isn't present because we had issues getting some of these tests to run successfully on nvidia's model by demand from the community we also brought back this retired chart this line plot shows noise level at a given fan rpm compared across multiple cards we originally retired the chart because the thermal results show the relevant data and because fan rpm doesn't necessarily actually mean anything when considered in a vacuum if the fans are different sizes if the output of the fans is different the noise expectations change the ftw3 peaks at about 56 dba with the floor closer to 32 at least when measured here and the gigabyte eagle follows almost an identical curve while the fe plots lower still however remember that the fe only has two fans making a connection to the point made a second ago and so its thermals run higher its cooler is configured differently its fan placement is even different with the back van technically slightly further away from the meter by nature of being on the back of the card and so of course it plots a little bit lower in noise levels time to look at the flatness of the cold plate this will help us better understand the performance that we just plotted the evga rtx 3080 ftw3 that we tested has fairly even depth from one point to the next measured with a precision needle from a known zero point and represented in microns the minimum was 7 microns and the maximum was about 27. there's a cluster around the 11 to 15 micron range which is what we want to see the bulk of the measurements are close to the median so we don't see a high count of measurements toward the outer bound of the chart the ftw3 plate is less consistent than the 2080ti strix and clustered measurement points but remains one of the better testing plates that we've seen thus far this image is a pseudo color pressure map of the evga rtx 3080 ftw3 this is actually the best pressure we've seen so far in a 3080 cooler there's uniform contact across almost the entire die with very few spots of low pressure contact or extreme high pressure as a reminder this isn't a literal height map it could be converted into one but it wouldn't show the actual height of the cold plate rather it's a map of the pressure in a given area this helps us see if the cooler has an inadequate mounting mechanism for example we most recently found that the 3080 tough from asus that we reviewed had large gaps in coverage missing we'll put some of the other 3080 plates on the screen to illustrate those differences gaps are filled by paste ultimately but ideally they would all look similar to the evga plate the goal is fairly uniform pressure with few points of again extreme high or low pressure in between the fe cards tend to have gaps around where the vapor chamber pillars as expected are formed while the traditional gold plates have an easier time of keeping things flat but fall prone to issues with the placement of screws and tension of those screws as applied by whoever designed the video card we'll look at the frequency next by using intentionally blown up scales to make differences more visible using a frozen 3dmark render on repeat we can easily gauge the ability of the card to stabilize its own frequency on all 3080 cards thus far we've seen a heavily fluctuating frequency based on power limitations and thermal performance with the evga 3080 fcw3 we see almost a perfectly flat line and that's for both v bios options but both of them are the highest power limitation that we've seen thus far the ocb bios holds marginally higher frequency as a result of its higher auto fan speed whereas the normal fan speed plots about 15 megahertz lower the difference is 1965 to 1950 megahertz both auto with the only difference being the fan speed and thus the temperature because this is a different workload than our thermal burn-in the results are at least slightly different for fan speed and then different for thermal data as well here's a comparative chart this one will be a bit messy but we'll plot it line by line to help the evga 3080 ftw3 has the highest power allowance and with that it's able to achieve a stable frequency but not the highest frequency the eagle bounces back and forth between 1980 megahertz and 20 20 megahertz but tends to average about 1990 to 1995 megahertz the fe card runs about 1930 megahertz in the same exact test with the tough performance v bios at about 1995 megahertz also the evga fdw3 plots about 1965 megahertz and this is with all auto settings as a reminder and also just rough numbers for the frequencies you can see obviously it's bouncing around depending on which card it is looking back at only the rtx 3080 ftw 3 it's worth plotting the fan rpm of the 2v bios profiles we already showed noise but here's the rpm to correspond with it in this plot the normal v bios runs at about 1600 to 1700 rpm when at 21 degrees ambient and that's at steady state for the gpu core the ftw 3 ocv bios runs at about 1900 to 2000 rpm in this workload when at steady state with the same ambient temperature remember this fan rpm will change based on ambience and case ambient but most cards will maintain hierarchy as they scale that's because the v bios is ultimately what's in control here when under auto conditions since it's not manually tuned and it's behaving under the out-of-the-box thermal targets for whatever v-bios is targeting for gpu core finally the last few charts for proper power testing we're looking now at our power logging metrics rather than the gpu-z quick reference metrics used in earlier thermal testing charts the rtx 3080 ftw3 with both the normal and ocv bios draw the same power at about 410 watts in fermark without a manual overclock or about 430 with the manual oc the xocb bios not shown here gets you to about 450 to 460 watts the asus tough pulled around 336 to 353 in this test depending on the clocks and the eagle pulled about 333 to 336 but keep in mind that the eagle doesn't have a power offset so overclocking doesn't really change power this is the card that we least recommend if you're seriously interested in overclocking even though the eagle is pretty good overall it's weak on that one front the 3080 fe meanwhile pulls 324 watts in this test a gaming workload doesn't change much the 3080 fcw3 manual oc is at 425 watts here while the stock 3080 fcw3 pulled about 400 watts the fe card was in the range of watts with a tough at about 340 watts that'll wrap up most the numbers now for gaming numbers just as a reminder we're not doing gaming benchmarks on any more of these partner model cards because it's irrelevant you're within one to 2 fps almost every single time unit unit doesn't matter the extra 50 watts the extra 60 watts it doesn't really change anything for gaming numbers for the most part it might be a couple fps in some extremely good cases you might be looking at maybe a three to five percent uplift uh with a couple outliers here and there but for the most part it's just irrelevant you already know where the game and performance is going to fall if you watch the original 3080 reviews and the first partner model review after that it's just not worth the time we'd rather spend the air time and save your time talking about the quality of life features so again that'd be things like the noise levels when out of box or the noise normalized performance how it compares in terms of efficiency versus the other overclocking things of that nature warranty support to some extent evga in the u.s at least has pretty strong warranty support not sure how they are outside of the us but our experience is obviously painted with the us brush so in terms of the other features of the card overclocking again we originally were limited to about a 50 to 75 megahertz offset offset is from baseline so that number doesn't mean anything if you compare it to another card with a different baseline but that's where we were limited originally that 450 watt bios we found can get you about 30 extra megahertz or so your mileage will vary based on the card uh we got 30 megahertz on one of these and we got 15 on the other so just depends on the gpu silicon quality but that extra power that was about 70 watts or so from the xo cv bios that dbga has released only on their forums if you flash that on it gives you a little bit more room for overclocking now if you're water cooling that becomes a lot more relevant that uh that v bios will matter significantly more than it will if you're on air you're going to become bound first by power and then by thermal and then after that by voltage and that voltage tick is only really going to matter once you're sub-ambient so that's the stuff to consider cooler design we have a separate tear down on the cooler it has not changed now that we have the four cap model the six cap model they're actually identical if you want to replace the red accents on the cards evga does have a replacement available unfortunately the way to do it these are plastic welded in so you can't pull them out uh you would remove the one two three four screws for the top of the card these are like a 2.5 or something allen and then there's three phillips screws holding two or three phillips screws holding the uh the shroud to the cooler itself so you'd email them and tell you you want a replacement shroud and then you take out about seven screws to do that that's how you would manage that for the rest of the cooler well we'll leave that to the tear down video if you're curious about it but overall there's good contact across the board we'd like to see more thermal pad usage on the back plate because there's more service area to work with evga could be leveraging it once you're spending 810 for a video card it feels like a couple extra pennies by the manufacturer for a little bit more thermal pad would be fine and then if you do take it apart be aware that they use thermal putty on the inductors and there is thrown putty out there what they're using is about five watts per meter kelvin and the replacements are like a hundred dollars for a big fat tube of it actually we have some right here so the thermal putty will be similar to something like this this one's from mauser if you want to buy some if you happen to take the card apart and need more to replace it doesn't stay in tact like the throttle pad does but does a good job of filling all the gaps so that's it for the 3080 f23 ultra gaming is it worth it well an extra 100 not particularly unless you're doing more competitive overclocking then the card's actually very good the xfc bios gets you a lot that you won't get from other cards the top has an advantage for overclocking enthusiasts and that it's got an elmore evc2 hookup so you can hook up an external voltage controller like the evc2 and control the voltage and that might get you a little bit more mileage if you're sub-ambient but otherwise the ftw3 has been the best we've worked with so far for extreme overclocking for a simple daily use it's not the best performer it's not bad but it's not like a top performer on the charts even when you power and always normalize if you're using it as intended and at the expected v bios power budget rather than an artificially limited one uh it'll be a bit warmer obviously it's warmer than fe because it's like 60 watts higher not a surprise really but the noise level is for the most part not too bad and we've got all the charts for you on this review if you want to judge one unit to the next on that so uh pricing's a bit a bit brutal but it's an overclocking enthusiast card and if that's not what you're after and you still want evga we'll be looking at the xc ultra next and that's more of a more affordable gamer type card so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more or if you want to support our in-depth testing including the pseudo-color pressure images and the cold plate flatness testing you can go to store.gamersaxis.net and pick up things like back ordering our mod mats or tool kits or buying some of our shirts or other items on the store thanks for watching we'll see you all next time [Music] the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 388,389

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 ultra gaming review, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 ultra review, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 review, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 xoc vbios, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 benchmark, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 overclocking, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 noise, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 thermals, best rtx 3080, asus rtx 3080 tuf oc

Id: uG_xJ_rC3WE

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Coronadoisdead]

Here's why I got a FTW3:

1. It was available.
2. EVGA has always been good to me on any past issues (through 4 cards).
3. Their policy is go to town overclocking, if it breaks from overclocking it's still covered (just don't gouge it with a screwdriver when modding).

But I am not surprised with his review, can be a loud card when pushed 100% which I barely ever do even on a 1440p 144hz screen unless benchmarking.

[u/Reinhardovich]

So EVGA's top of the line card loses to ASUS's entry level card in terms of cooler efficiency and acoustics? Pretty disappointing stuff from EVGA here.

[u/Loferix]

GN is getting very different results from the techpowerup review. I have no idea who to believe, im gonna wait for hardware unboxed I guess

[u/Jaz1140]

Did Steve use the new 450w bios??

[u/tothjm]

To end this thread... If you are lucky enough to be able to buy any of these be thankful I still don't have one lol

[u/Tepozan]

Damn ASUS TUF is a steal then at $699

[u/Oftenwrongs]

For me, the evga ultra can get super loud and 82 degrees. I posted on their forums and even added 3 fans to my case. It is what it is.

[u/ReliantG]

I have a 3090 FTW3 Ultra and using default fan curve max power limit slider, so same collar, more to cool. I never hear the fans and I stick around 65c while gaming, 68 in stress tests. I’m really not sure what more people want from this card, but I am happy.

[u/TheBlack_Swordsman]

Hm. Results seem different from TPU.

Edit: response to user misinformedallday

Tech power up doesn't have the same results Steve does here.

The TUF OC runs at 75% fan speed and gets 63C, average power consumption 305W, max 372W

https://tpucdn.com/review/asus-geforce-rtx-3080-tuf-gaming-oc/images/clocks-and-thermals.png

https://tpucdn.com/review/asus-geforce-rtx-3080-tuf-gaming-oc/images/power-gaming-average.png

https://tpucdn.com/review/asus-geforce-rtx-3080-tuf-gaming-oc/images/power-gaming-peak.png

The FTW3 is running at 65% fan speed (TPU is using GPU-Z which doesn't report the right percentage for EVGA cards, 1968rpm /3000 rpm = 65%), Average Power consumption of 317W, Max 400W

https://tpucdn.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/images/clocks-and-thermals2.png

https://tpucdn.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/images/power-gaming-average.png

https://tpucdn.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/images/power-gaming-peak.png

Taking that into account, then the FTW3 has the advantage in performance.

OC the FTW3 runs +8% faster than the stock FE. That's actually quite a bit but people keep "hand waving" and saying a OC are useless on cards because the first batches that came out were quite power limited and only doing +2-3%.

https://tpucdn.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/images/overclocked-performance.png

TUF OC vs FTW3, that's a 5C difference where the TUF is running a 10% higher in fan speed and the FTW3 is drawing 12-30W more. Of course the FTW3 is going to run a little hotter in this scenario. Run the same fan percentage and same power draws on the card and tell me how their coolers design.

Now something I'll agree with you on, yes the TUF is the best bang for the buck in terms of performance, certainly. But people grab the FTW3 for the RGB lightbar, at least I hope that's the reason or it's higher OC headroom.

And yes, Steve is omitting benchmarks and testing because they're only a few percent in range of one another, but just thought id mention that the FTW3 is one of the top performing cards.

https://imgur.com/a/s76TFCM

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/asus-geforce-rtx-3080-tuf-gaming-oc/32.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ftw3-ultra/32.html

At the end of the day, the TUF is definitely the best bang for the buck. But I don't think people are shopping for the FTW3 because of its performance per a dollar, I'm certain it is it's OC headroom (can perform on par with a stock 3090) and RGB lightbar.

https://imgur.com/a/lqxsHJo

There's no other card that comes close on terms of RGB capability, subjectively speaking.

Both are fantastic cards for different reasons. It's a "to each their own."