RTX 3090 Overclocking Battle vs. JayzTwoCents & Paul's Hardware (ft. Liquid Metal)

jay has mostly been occupied beating himself that sounded wrong so we recently posted an sli 3090 high score on port royal just for fun it was with the completely jerry rigged setup where i was running an fe card in ftw3 we'll show some shots of it and it was one of the most beautiful works of art i've ever created in terms of computing power but it was not meant to be a high scoring system so we just posted something fully stocked now it's time to do actual overclocking with it and we're going to be competing against paul and jay for port royal scores the plan is to ramp up gradually through crazier setups as we go until we reach a point where we probably have to go liquid nitrogen so paul is currently the leader out of the three of us jay is at the time this video goes up who knows jay might pass paul but they're competing with each other and we've been working on reviews kind of watching from afar going hmm at some point we're gonna have to jump in there so i'm gonna start that today before that this video is brought to you by arctic cooling and its liquid freezer 2 line arctic is actively restocking its liquid freezer 2 coolers that rank among the top performers for cpu coolers right now including on ryzen cpus the liquid freezer 2 series is focused on high throttle performance and value featuring a blackout design and including a vrm fan mounted on top of the pump block to help provide airflow over neighboring vrm heatsinks arctic has also started selling its p-12 case fans learn more at the links in the description below so i have a couple tricks up my sleeve for this but one of the limitations everyone's on different cards i think jay might be moving to evga f23s i'm trying to get some asus cards in like some tufts or strix cards because well actually i'm not going to reveal why but there's a specific reason that would give us an advantage and i guess i won't reveal what that is but if we can get them then we've got a different angle we can take to overclocking but on these cards i don't currently have the unlocked custom bios i think jay might have gotten one from someone that's fully unlocked but until we get one probably i'm going to end up doing a shunt mod on this and just soldering some shunt resistors on so i think we might end up going the hard mod route modifying the cards i'd like to get an evga e-power board on here like an e-power 5 on the card so we have some voltage control but i couldn't find any evga doesn't have any anymore if you happen to have two lying around i guess paint us and we'll buy them off of you or something but what we're going to do for now is set up an initial bench we're going to go full air cooling today no water just yet and the goal is going to be to see how far we can get without going too extreme so water blocks will eventually happen and chilled water will eventually happen but until that time i want to see if we can catch up to these guys with only air cooling nothing too crazy so we've already used this bench on a live stream where we did single card overclocking this is an asus apex board which is one of the best overclocking motherboards especially because of the two dimm slots so the memory overclocking is a lot easier on this we're gonna use a 10900 kf uh port oil is not very cpu sensitive which actually is a little bit of a letdown for me because i feel like i feel like i have a pretty strong edge and cpu overclocking and memory overclocking that would benefit us here but alas port royal is almost entirely gpu bound so improving cpu scores and frequencies won't do a ton for us but we're going to clock it's probably 5.3 and stop around there and i might do some memory tuning as well but nothing crazy because it doesn't really matter gpu matters most one of the biggest issues that we're going to run into here is the four slot spacing of the sli bridge so this was something we talked about in our sli benchmark where not only were we using different cards where the bridge the sli fingers are not aligned the same on different models but also the spacing doesn't line up and so we ran risers in that content unfortunately for whatever reason nvidia decided its first round would be only four slot even though in talking with board vendors they often sold ten to one three slot space into four and you can you can kind of start pushing them towards each other but i want to snap the pcie uh slot so that's our limitation we're gonna have to run risers there's a very small performance hit for that but not much of one the pcie lane assignment by by eight it's not going to matter here for port royal top scores with liquid nitrogen even are still on by eight by eight so we're not worried about that but i am gonna have to run risers which is unfortunate the good thing is that it'll space them out so we'll have a little a lot more breathing room actually for the car while it's air cooled and that uh extra cooling performance will negate the performance hit i think and we may end up actually better off for it now we have one board that does have uh four slot space and one motherboard but it is an asrock i think tai cheezy 490 board and i would like to actually win so i'm not gonna use it i think i have a better chance with the setup we're gonna make than with the asrock board okay so for the cooler for the cpu we use an arctic liquid freezer 360. i'm just going to use kpx paste for that and the liquid freezer 360 should be more than enough for an uh like a 5.3 overclock you don't need crazy cooling for the for port royal benchmarking because we don't need crazy clocks so just make sure there's enough paste to really trigger commenters and then we'll be good to go line up the vrm fan although not super necessary for this but it it doesn't hurt [Music] okay fans we're gonna run all these just at 100 percent and i've got one running over uh this fans going over here i'm gonna plug those two in i'm probably gonna need a fan controller at some point we're missing one oh unfortunately these aren't rgb but they are they are ybr so we're pretty close uh every now and then for normal maintenance you got to go and floss your heat sinks two dimms is going to be better for memory overclocking when we do it this is memory that we've done a lot of a lot of good overclocks with it's a 4 000 megahertz kit but can clock up pretty high ssd is another secret weapon of mine i have very heavily uh pruned the os so i've stripped out a lot of the unnecessary stuff from the os and i think that's something the others haven't done at all so that'll be a pretty big benefit for us on the cpu scoring side okay so next we've got gotta get power supplies and the risers in place i'll probably do the risers first i'm gonna do two power supplies for this technically not required but it will help with stability which we might trip ocp i don't think we should but uh it'll be a pain to swap it later so we're gonna make sure we don't deal with ocp and then we're also going to it'll improve the power quality anyway so this uh this is just going to support the cards and then what i'm going to do is leave this area open actually let's do this before i do all that stuff i'm gonna get some fans in there i'm gonna do this as a pull here's what i'm thinking fan goes here under the cards there'll be a fan remember i'm trying to do all air cooled now all ambient see if i can beat their scores with just ambient so i think that would be the most embarrassing for them so we'll do intake here exhaust here i'll sit uh knock to an exhaust fan up top and i might put a fan here too as intake so if i do it this way the reason i want a fan here is exhaust so again best benefit of getting away from the board is you look at the fins they're oriented vertically the exhaust this way and out the bottom so air is going to be spitting out down anyway if i get a fan down there it'll help pull the heat away from the cooler and we'll put an intake over here that's higher pressure than the exhaust down there so most the air should still get all the way in between the cards and feed this fan for the gpu this will feed the other card for the gpu and then top exhaust fan will pull heat away from here and then we might do another fan on this side either as intake or exhaust depending on what the pressure is like we're going to put it here this is the best exposure of the fins to the underside of the cards i can't get great coverage overall but this will do a little bit next one i'm going to mount this to the bench so now time to figure out the gpus i don't trust a single one of these risers risers are often bad i'm going to put a small piece of foam here just so these pins don't dig into the wire underneath it it's a bit of an insulator which isn't great but it's it's better than letting one dig into the other i should probably replace these cards we'll get them going as is first then i might do liquid metal after problem with liquid metal is we won't be able to scale to below zero because liquid metal gets better as your temperature increases it'll get worse as it decreases once we get below zero liquid metal starts really losing its efficacy but may be useful while we're on ambient still this doesn't require additional hands at all we'll use the bridge for structural support all right there's our setup so i'm going to put actually i'll put the other corsair fan up here and i'll do the knock to a 3000 rpm one on this side to shove as much air down there as i can this one will go about here as exhaust and that should help pull heat away from the cards but we have to set up power supplies first cabling is going to become a huge mess this is going to be my system power supply so for this kind of overclock we're only going to need one of these power connectors for the cpu we are well below the spec uh it will not it will it will do actually nothing for us if we use both so we're just going to use one i'm definitely gonna want auxiliary power into the motherboard uh via molex and that's gonna be for multi gpu so um basically these slots are the official pcie sig spec says that they shouldn't be taking more than 75 watts per slot uh these cards pull about 80 to 85 so it is technically over spec at least in our initial testing and i don't want to melt 24 pin cables any more than necessary so um adding auxiliary power will resolve that concern they the boards should be able to do like 200 plus watts uh technically before melting the cables but we're just gonna we're just gonna play it safe here because i did have an issue earlier auxiliary power complete the board side is good to go so i'm going to need six cables for six pcie cables discreet ones so there's two we don't want to use uh daisy chaining on this just because i mean why why would you if you don't have to we're going to be putting these things under a lot of load so i this power supply fortunately is not going to try and do any ocp i don't think or protect itself so that'll simplify things a lot from an overclocking standpoint ocp's over current protection typically the giveaway is if you get a black screen and a reboot or a shot down that would often be ocp but we don't want that you want to make sure both these are in the ocb bios so the bios switch dip switch up here so i flip those both into ocd bios should be a little bit higher power target although you'll see in our review it doesn't necessarily do a whole lot on these particular cards and just to be clear here as well we've already completed all the data for the review so if i start tearing things apart or changing them then that was all done after the reviews already been checked for data so this one we can just run a jumper too i also have one of these but i want to use it so i don't really trust it with this much power so this is a 24 pin you would connect the secondary power supply 24 here and the primary into molex and it would turn this on and then trigger that power supply with a ps on signal when um you boot but with this amount of stuff going on we're just going to do it the way i know will work i'll put that over there so i can find it if i need it okay i should probably run this to a separate circuit too power extension the extension sucks to have but it's going to go to a different circuit entirely and that's going to be in this room and it's a 20 amp circuit so although the cable length isn't great isolating them i think has higher benefit you'll get voltage drop a little bit um with power consumption as high as this will be all right that's good luck both in one go oh very good luck got all those cables in blind one try that's how you know jay and paul are doomed so i'm gonna run a load-bearing gamer's nexus screwdriver here just to keep it from bouncing around that's exhaust this one is 3000 rpm this is the primary reason i'd rather do this as an upload than a stream although we'll do streams once we can get it quieter but this setup is going to be very loud uh fine for an upload not conducive to a stream i'm gonna mount this here and in order to do that i think i need some more zip tie or twist ties so this will be pushing air in between the two cards again 3000 rpm server fan okay not bad so there's our intake on this cable over here i think all the fans are plugged in except this one oh these are these are good cable runs this is the best kale management i've done in a very long time she would be proud of me okay is that everything a couple a couple things to keep track of but i think that's everything we want this one on first so we're gonna do actually i think i can turn this on if it doesn't boot oh i better do it this way i got to do this one then this one and then this button please no melted cables cool okay uh let's get into bio so do an overclock and on the cpu just do a simple one so first of all i guess i'll walk through this stuff as i do it okay all right now that we've gotten past our first major hurdle uh i'm gonna set all the fans i think they're already on max yes okay so our max fan speed that's what i want we're gonna go to extreme tweaker and uh let's see so xmp is fine i think this is all right 53x is already set this is from the live streams we did and i think i'm running a i could probably increase this cash ratio to like 50 maybe but we're going to leave it there for now because gpu benchmark anyway core voltage 1.4 is fine we're on llc level 4 so that'll actually droop quite a bit but that's what we want 1.5 for dram drams fine that's all good so all the protections should be disabled okay it looks good there so we're going to start with this i might do some memory and some uh cash tuning later i'm gonna do a stock run first and i think paul's score was like 27 400 or something when i last checked that may have moved around i don't know if jay submitted anything but we'll get a run in stock quick overclock i think they have one of them at least has an unlimited v bios which i don't have right now uh so that basically raises the ceiling where there's a power offset in like precision or whatever overclocking application you're using that's tied to v bios b bios is the limiter for that power offset so it's measured in percentage percentage is obviously used as a multiplier against some base metric so if your base metric is 460 and it's 108 uh as opposed to like say 400 watts per base and maybe 115 you could feasibly end up in a better scenario where your percentage offset is a lower number but your total power is higher a lot of people mix this up where they're like oh this card allows you to do 125 percent this one's only 107 therefore 125 percent's better except if 125 multiplied by a smaller base metric starting position is lower then it's actually not better anyway i'm gonna be limited to the v bios that came on the cards and that means we're gonna be very power limited here so the solution that i will probably deploy is going to be shunt modding which we've done before on titan rtx's i'll probably probably solder in some shunt resistors to get around the power limitations okay and uh in the meantime we're gonna be limited to i think 107 yep definitely doing 100 fan speeds i know that one of these cards which is going to be the inner card right now inner card is the one that actually it's our card this one this card does a 1200 megahertz memory offset which is absolutely insane really good performer in our live stream uh 80 megahertz offset core but we're gonna work our way up to that i've typically found that you have better performance scaling in these apps at least in this benchmark if you start lower with the memory and work your way up uh i don't know if this is just misfortune or what but not too long ago when i determined this is good at 1200 i started there once and the scoring was not as good as when i worked up to that point this could very easily be like overclocker mysticism voodoo magic that's not actually true and it just happened once for my scenario and would never happen again i don't know but uh that's been my experience with it uh you're you know it could have been some weird memory strap thing i don't really know but we're gonna start at like let's start at 800 for both cards let's start at 50 core for both cards we'll go up to 75 in a bit and uh keeping in mind that i actually haven't overclocked these both together yet so that's what i'm gonna have to figure out here we're gonna be bound by the slowest of the two cards which is unfortunate for us save that okay i think we're ready for a port royal run actually let's run this one windowed and i'm going to check on the temperatures while we're running just because this is kind of a this isn't a hacked together setup at all so we shouldn't have to worry about anything but i'm going to check anyway now another thing i might actually i won't reveal this yet i've got a couple of other tricks that i think the other guys won't figure out so i'll keep them to myself but we have a few ideas where i think i can uh i can outperform some of their more more unlimited setups with just some extra skill thrown and some experience thrown in so right now this is the slower of the two and temperatures actually even on them which is great that's not something i was expecting to see thinking that they'll break rank with each other in a little bit 56 57 this is significantly slower card so we're going to maybe work on that one a little bit drawing less power so there could actually be an application difference too between the two which card is this first so this is the inner card this is the one that is sandwiched it's running a couple degrees warmer but actually i mean that's i'm pretty happy with that they're very near each other uh it is however often the slower card in terms of frequency so we'll keep an eye on that feel the warm air coming out of the fan it's just finished the run so it's not as warm now but there's a lot of hot air coming out there that's good that means the fans positioned well and then this one on the bottom i can feel warm air also so those are those are oriented the optimal way i think if i get this to actually sit back a little more it'll pull some heat off the back side of the gpu does it count as liquid nitrogen use if i just like spray it out of the tank hose at the system no getting a no from the judge does not count as liquid nitrogen use so here's the end of the demo we're over 12 000 frames drawn twelve thousand approaching thirteen thousand frames rendered now that should be about double not quite it'll it's close to double our some of our original scores on single card so that's pretty good scaling 26768 uh let me look up where they are okay so kane pen is at 31 000 545 he's on liquid nitrogen we'll get there eventually but uh we'll work our way up through it paul is at twenty seven thousand four hundred two that's pretty damn close for first run but i'm gonna need more than that i don't know he might have a higher power limit might have a higher overclock uh jay is not on here yet but he did tweet a photo of his builds so he should be on there soon so we've we've got about a thousand points i need to gain to at least get ahead of paul which is a lot definitely going to be a little tough without going to water or higher power or something but see how far we can get i kind of want to take these cards apart and disconnect all the leds because i bet that got me a couple watts back i think it could work that might that might knock some of the things over jay will cry i can't i can't and could faith do it jay will cry on twitter it wasn't running yet seriously the score should be in oh okay all right we just lost video 26 8 30 that's not too bad so here's the situation we moved over to the other set because i need space the the first card i have is amazing and it can do a 1200 megahertz offset of memory and pretty high encore like 80 megahertz or so offset obviously that's that's an offset so it's from whatever your base number is but the second card seems to be having difficulty above 900 megahertz for memory offset and the core is not strong either so i think what i need to do i'm going to start with disconnecting all the leds from both these cards that should buy me a couple watts to play around with hopefully i'm hoping for like 10 but we'll see and then i'm also going to just while they're open anyway put liquid metal on the gpus we don't generally recommend liquid metal for gpus because it's already direct die contact to the cooler so thermal paste will do almost everything that liquid metal will do and it's not going to dry out in the same way that liquid metal sometimes does and it's just a little bit easier to work with but for this instance we're going to go with liquid metal because by the time i'm below zero uh i probably am taking the card apart again anyway for a water cooler so let's get rid of these leds and get some liquid metal on there we'll use conduct and not we'll insulate it and see if it improves things just by way of bringing down the temperature because you bring down the temperature frequency will scale up on its own so hopefully that helps us out here okay so for this one everything you need if you do take one of these apart is in the gamer's nexus tear down tool kit which is on store.gamingtexas.net and we're also working on one of our mod mats so i'm just use our phillips head screwdrivers mostly for this uh we only really need to show one of these it'll be the same process for both this is the one i've already taken apart because you can see i've added a thermal pad in there and that should be helping sync some of the heat this card's also going to go into the primary slot rather than secondary because it was performing a lot better that way previously although it shouldn't really matter okay there's that this contact is not very good for these so maybe i should actually just replace these thermal pads evga is thrown pads this wasn't us they they just don't make full coverage on the memory so a little concerned about that but we do have memory sensors on here as part of icx here's his first led get rid of that one all right so first led uh this one right here that's the big led so that's unplugged now we're not going to plug that back in i'm tempted to run these fans to external cables as well but i don't think i have enough i have some but i could take one of these out and look at the amp the current and figure out how many watts it's pulling but uh okay let's just do liquid metal once we're trying to reroute the fans at that point we might as well just just do a shunt resistor mod anyway so nail polish is just used to protect the smds the surface mount devices and prevent a short if the liquid metal runs off the side of the gpu and and happens to land where some surface mount devices are so prevent completing the circuit pretty simple now because there is thermal paste mixed in there so there's not the greatest contact i'm also going to cover it with captain tape just to really protect the gpu all right so this is conduct not i need a couple drops and it will need to be on the cold plate and on the gpu this is as the name implies conductive and so you need to not get it on any other components on the board the application also must be very thin having to go over these bumpy letters on the surface of the gpu is extremely annoying um like ideally i'd probably sand that off but at some point we're gonna hit diminishing returns and we're gonna eventually go cold anyway so as a reminder this stuff will not work well once we're really cold but it will work extremely well anywhere above zero even below zero a little bit but not for liquid nitrogen or anything it's actually one of jay's pitfalls in the last challenge when we did this he um used liquid metal once once he was going below zero with i think dry ice or something or chilled water and it wasn't as good you really don't need much with this stuff you don't want it to look like a runny pool of liquid so i've got a little bit of that going on on the right side i'm just going to drag it around and distribute it evenly okay it looks pretty good so it took a while but i was able to beat paul score he was at 27 452 i think and finally got up to 27 461 with all of this mess this is about as far as these cards can go without moving to a different cooling solution so jay currently i had passed him but he's at i think he gained an extra thousand points in there somewhere so he's probably hooked up his air conditioner or something like that but i've been busy trying to just catch up to paul score we've been doing all these reviews and things so paul was my main target for tonight jay has mostly been occupied beating himself that sounded wrong jay has been busy contesting his own score so currently we're past paul that's probably gonna change by the time this uploads that's how these things go but as of right now we're past him and i want to go over a couple of things that got us past where paul is so i do not have an unlocked v bios i'm not sure if jay does i'm not sure if paul does they may have talked about that in their videos but we don't have an unlock to be bios that's our biggest limiter right now for scoring potential the things i found perform the best here if anyone wants to take away anything in some loose testing it looked like disabling the windows uh gpu scheduling management stuff under graphic settings disabling that appears to produce better scores than enabling it i haven't done a lot of a b testing but at least in port royal it looks like it does better with that feature off and that was worth several hundred points assuming the the quick back-to-back tests were something to judge off of secondly i did some memory tuning on the system ram and that did bring us up probably it was worth about 30 points somewhere so brought down trfc specifically into the 300s it was originally auto setting to 700 which is insane and terrible i brought down four active window significantly it was 48 auto which is also insane and terrible so brought that down originally to 28 and then down closer to 26 or 4 somewhere in there and then a couple others like write latency cke a couple of the trrd settings lns so basically tuned a bunch of memory that was worth a couple points and what was worth the most actually kind of somewhat surprising somewhat not was reducing the fan speed on the gpus so i was blasting them at 100 fan speed to try and get every little bit of frequency i could out of the lower temperature but actually what that was doing was costing me more power than i was gaining in temperature reduction so we were hitting diminishing returns and after doing some testing back and forth with different fan settings it seems like about 83 81 to 83 percent was where i got the best mix of cooling performance and frequency bump by way of having that little bit of extra power headroom to play with between 83 and 100 fan speed at 100 fan speed we're sucking so much power board power into the fans that it was actually negating the temperature benefit so that was the biggest takeaway that that gained us a significant amount of points and then beyond that both these cars are under liquid metal right now we have a separate content piece that'll be going up on the performance differences by going to liquid metal for the gpus it's it's pretty good it was roughly on one card it was roughly seven to nine degrees celsius improvement and the frequency bump was in the range of 15 to 25 megahertz but we're gonna have a whole lot more data on that in our upcoming liquid metal on an rtx 3090 video so uh that's pretty much the max i can do without an unlock speed bios or without soldering shunt resistors onto the cars just probably my my next step as for the settings well unfortunately my second card is so much weaker than the first one that we're bound pretty heavily by the second card i found that switching the cards such that the better performing card was in the top slot did improve performance significantly so an amount that uh it seems like not just random chance or test variance or anything like that so maybe the first card's getting loaded a little more heavily not exactly sure how port royal is programmed but either way that seemed to help it might just be a matter of the temperature too where one of them might have a better mount or better liquid metal application than the other and so the one that is uh the least advantage than cooling might be doing better on the outside rather than the inside of the two cards so that helped a lot too and finally the settings i ran were i think it was let me let me open them up so the settings we ran were 50 megahertz core offset i was able to run higher on one of the two cards than that at about 80 when it was running solo but together it seems like they become unstable past 50 offset on the core which is very unfortunate the fan speed was 83 that was the the peak before diminishing returns and then memory i was able to get running at 900 it seemed to do best at 860 to 880 and 900 i re-ran it a few times and finally gained a couple points after some additional tuning so that's where we are for now we are as of filming this which is uh it is currently saturday the third at night so as i'm filming this we're ahead of paul and we're behind jay to catch jay definitely would have to move to some other kind of solution do some hard mods something like that he's got to be on water or air conditioning or something to get those kinds of scores and then paul if he doesn't do anything crazy i think we can go back and forth a little bit there i have a couple of other tricks in mind and i'm okay with sharing one of them which would be to uh reroute the fan connectors into something else rather than the gpu to bring us a bit more power to the core and on that that note as well one of the things i did to give us a little bit of extra power was to disconnect all the leds on the cards so that was worth a couple watts and that helped out too so pretty happy with that this is definitely the max we're very close to it that we can do on these cards out for the mods uh so certainly at this point this is where the fun will begin and we'll have to try and catch up to jnx with probably i don't know water or something we'll figure it out let's check back for more thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more go check out both paul and jay on youtube if you want to check their videos in this series uh there's until we get to live streams for it it's gonna be a lot of back and forth where in the uploads we're passing each other but in reality when you see the upload the situation may have changed but you still get to see the process and learn a lot along the way about how these things behave how you get a little bit of extra performance out of them so uh that's it for now go to store.camerasaccess.net or patreon.com gamersexes help that directly we'll see you all next time the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 398,337

Rating: 4.9325604 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, #ripjay, #rippaul, overclocking battle, rtx 3090 overclocking battle, evga rtx 3090 ftw3, world record overclocking

Id: -OaJRBDdPfg

Length: 39min 8sec (2348 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020