**Understanding Thermal Throttling in NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080**

In this article, we will delve into the world of thermal throttling on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080. The device has been at the center of controversy due to its tendency to throttle performance under high loads. In this discussion, we'll explore what thermal throttling means and how it affects the card's performance.

Thermal Throttling: A Necessary Evil?

Thermal throttling refers to the behavior of a computer component, in this case, the GeForce RTX 3080, that reduces its performance when its temperature reaches a certain threshold. This is done as a safety measure to prevent overheating and potential damage to the component. The card's thermal design, including the vapor chamber cooler with a fan profile set by NVIDIA, plays a crucial role in determining its operating temperatures.

**The Reality of Thermal Throttling**

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 was touted as a powerhouse for gaming and content creation, but recent testing has revealed that it suffers from significant thermal throttling. The company's own marketing materials boasted temperatures as low as 67°C, which raised eyebrows among enthusiasts and critics alike. However, the reality is far from perfect. In this article, we'll explore how to bypass thermal throttling and achieve optimal performance.

Bypassing Thermal Throttling: A Custom Approach

One way to overcome thermal throttling is by tweaking fan profiles. By adjusting the fan settings, it's possible to maintain temperatures within a safer range while still achieving high frame rates. In this case, increasing the fan speed from 80% to 120°C allowed us to bypass thermal throttling and reach higher clock speeds.

**The Importance of Custom Fan Profiles**

Custom fan profiles can play a significant role in mitigating thermal throttling. By creating a bespoke fan curve that ramps up and slows down as needed, enthusiasts can ensure optimal cooling performance while still maintaining high frame rates. This approach requires some technical expertise, but the results can be well worth the effort.

**The Impact of Case Flow**

Case flow, or airflow within the case, also plays a critical role in thermal throttling. In an open-air test bench, the only cooling factor was the card itself, resulting in higher temperatures and reduced performance. Conversely, using a well-designed case with adequate airflow can help reduce temperatures and mitigate thermal throttling.

**NVIDIA's Mistake: Misleading Marketing**

The recent controversy surrounding NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 has raised questions about the company's marketing strategies. The touted 67°C temperature threshold was misleading, as it didn't accurately reflect the card's real-world performance under heavy loads. By presenting a distorted view of the product's capabilities, NVIDIA may have inadvertently created expectations that were not met.

**The Future of Cooling: Watercooling and Multi-Fan Solutions**

As enthusiasts continue to push the boundaries of computer hardware, cooling solutions will become increasingly important. Partner cards like EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotek are already offering custom designs with multifan heat pipe coolers that can help mitigate thermal throttling. These advanced cooling systems will be crucial in achieving optimal performance and maintaining temperatures within a safe range.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, understanding thermal throttling on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 is essential for optimizing performance. By tweaking fan profiles, using custom designs, and taking into account case flow, enthusiasts can work around the limitations of this device. While thermal throttling may seem like a limitation, it serves as a reminder of the importance of effective cooling solutions in computer hardware.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys jense coming at you with another video and today we are going to talk specifically about the topic of thermal throttling and the GTX 1080 now I can hear you already what do you mean thermal throttling Nvidia showed a demo where it was only running 67c so today we're going to talk about thermal throttling and why pretty much every single reviewer on YouTube with the 1080 was a little bit shocked about the high temperatures that the founders Edition card was demonstrating and I'm going to show you what's happening and pretty much how I got around it with doing my benchmarks cuz a lot of people were like what the hell Jay your temps are not as as high as others were saying so with that said let's get started the master case 5 and master case 5 Pro from Cooler Master combines modularity with creativity giving you the freedom to build it your way make it yours by clicking the link down in the description now what is thermal throttling now if you're really new you probably have no idea what that is if you're an advanced user you're like yeah know what it is just get on with it so for that there's a little slider bar just click forward if you're you know Advanced user now thermal only exists on CPUs and gpus together where the software or you know the actual controller or bios whatever you want to call it will try to save itself from dying a high temperature death by dialing back both voltages and frequencies to keep the temperatures below a certain Target now the GTX 1080 ships with a temperature Target of 83° c and what that means is is go ahead and ramp up the speed automatically to whatever you want but as soon as it hits 83 oh you better start backing things off to get it in check now when it comes to the Nvidia demonstration obviously they weren't doing live gaming when they hit that 67c while overclocked and for all we know they could have had the fans running at 100% on the card uh again we didn't see the test rig we only saw the Precision overlay showing 67c and 2114 MHz again we have no idea what the load was like we couldn't see CPU load and that was just a 3D rendering uh of a 3D image it wasn't actually playing any games so that's something to keep in in mind so that's why when myself and a lot of other reviewers we all started kind of talking behind the scenes with each other as we were doing our testing like hey are you noticing your card getting really hot and it was like wow I thought it was just mine and it turns out everybody was complaining about high temperatures because we expected it to be a lot lower now 16 NM finfet is a very very small chip and what that means is you're going to have a lot of focus here heat so the idea of 67c underload was really kind of mindboggling because with it being so small and focused we expected the temperatures to actually be kind of hot turns out they uh they kind of are now the folks over at Gamers Nexus actually did a Frankenstein build where they noticed they had high heat so what they did was they ripped a hybrid cooler off of an EVGA card stuck it on their 1080 to see what would happen and if that would fix thermal throttling what I'm going to do today is I'm going to turn around here I'm going to do some live gaming with an overlay I'm going to show you the throttling in progress and then I'm going to show you pretty much what's happening as it's thermal throttling how far it's coming down and then how uh I got around it without having to rip off the cooler and do anything custom but don't worry we are going to be ripping off the cooler because of course I've got my uh GTX 1080 full cover water block from Ek first one off the assembly line baby oh yeah and if you saw that picture that EK sent out with the block on it with the green fluid that was my card and that was this block wow yeah mind blown right transition and all right so we're going to be doing this test here with some Crisis 3 because it's pretty demanding um and I've got the setting set up pretty much to where I would assume people with a 1080 would put it which is very high preset with a 4X msaa and I'm running at 1440p uh so here's what we got we've got OSD here up from afterburner and we've got on the starting from the left here that top left is the power limit that's the percentage of power limit what that means is if it exceeds the number that is preset whether it be 100 uh obviously 100% power envelope if it starts to go higher than that 100% power draw that's set from in the Bios then it's going to start limiting clocks and things to try and keep it under that 100% uh obviously this is our GPU temperature here we're running at 44c in the menu this next one here is our GPU utilization or usage so we're only sitting at 30% utilization in the menu this is the fan speed core clock and then FPS so what we're going to do here is we're going to play the game uh with the GPU sitting here you know not too hot it hasn't heat soaked or anything but I do have the room the room fairly closed up the doors closed the AC vent is off and the window is closed so the temperature in this room is starting to get a little bit of underbob sweat if you know what I'm saying but what we want to pay attention to here is obviously the temperature number and the core clock number I have the other stuff up here so you can see how it relates are we thermaling due to temperature or we thermal throttle or we throttling due to power Target also I want you to keep an eye of what the fan percent Peres here and then GP utilization is pretty much always going to be at 100% but we've got all those numbers up there so that you can see how they're correlating with each other to get a big picture of what's actually happening with the GPU now as you can see we started off here at 1873 MHz it just boosted up right away just boom you can see our power usage here did hit 101 for a second and as you can see when that happens this starts to come down our temperature is nowhere near our Target yet but our power usage is and so that starts to come down so you're going to notice a few few things happening here it all it's a balancing act on the way throttling actually works with the graphics card it's not always temperature related but more often than not it could be now I have a couple of profiles set up here too which 100% out of the box which is what you're seeing right now and then I have another profile set up no overclocking or anything it's just power Target or power limit and our uh temperature threshold and what that will do is I will increase the temperature from the factory setting of 83 which is where it will start the thermal throttle and then we're going to raise that up to 92 and then I have got the power limit set to 120% so we can exceed the power envelope designed by Nvidia by 20% before it starts to pull back power due to power draw as you can see while I'm just sitting here talking our temperature has raised up to 78c and our core clock has dropped already from 1870 range down to 1810 but that's still higher than the advertised 1733 boost clock but you can see now we're dipping down in the 1700s but as you can see just that little bit of a battle we're down to 1721 our power limit is only at 85 82 it's not even at 100 but you can see our thermals is sitting at 82 so we are now thermal throttling so we've come all the way down to 1645 for a second there so we're almost down to the base clock now all right well now you can see we're all the way down to 1620 between 1645 and 1620 so we've pretty much lost our boost clock now and we're pretty soon are going to hit 1607 so what I'm going to do now is I'm simply going to change my profile here and as you can see by by changing my profile by letting the power Target go up and the temperature Target go up we immediately went all the way back to se 1797 and as you can see we're not even throttling anymore well okay it bounce around a little bit but you can see the fan speeds come up a little bit temperatures come up to 86 we're past that and power limit has gone above 100% now but look at what the clock is doing the clock is staying much more stable and I just died again but look at that temperature still or the core clock is still sitting at 1785 but the temperatures have have gone up obviously a couple of degrees but you can see if you give it just a little bit of extra temperature Headroom it will actually go up pretty high on the core clock so all the way back up to 1797 again now what I want to point out here is the GPU is sitting at 66% fan speed but it's actually really quiet it's so much quieter than the other cards typically are so now one other thing I want to do real quick just to just to see obviously here is I'm going to open up after burner and I'm going to put the fan manually to what I did in my test which was 80% so the fan speed kicked up a little bit more the noise came up a little bit obviously you can see the fan speed is now at 80% but keep an eye on the temperature is right there do you see how now we're sitting straight at 1797 and it's not even moving now if we take a look right here at our core clock as you can see it is just bouncing all over the place it started off nice and high 1873 where we started the video and then it came all the way back down into very low 1620 which is barely above bo uh the base clock of 16007 and then it's still just bouncing all around but the second I increased right here this to 120 and the temperature limit to 92 it didn't reach 92 as you can see the highest temperature was 87 yeah still very very hot but I want to point out that right here you can see that we just stuck to 1797 boom it no longer throttled anymore so it definitely is thermal based on the way the core clock are kind of bouncing all around transition okay so then why is this such a big deal well quite honestly I think Nvidia made the mistake of showing that 3D rendering demo and then pointing at the screen and saying but it only run 67c because that was very misleading in my opinion where it's a gamer's card it's not a card that's being boasted as being a productivity card it's a gaming card and you put a gaming load on it especially with the founders cooler even though it's a vapor chamber with the fan profile that they have set up it will thermal throttle and it will thermal throttle back down to practically its base clock but as you can see by changing the temperature Target and changing the power limit we were able to bypass that and then get all the way up to 1,800 what well 1797 MHz on my card and it only went up to about 87c now I say only because I allowed it to go to 92 but it didn't get there so what that means is the thermal throttling is happening right at the upper echelon of where the limits are for that cooler now the other thing you could obviously do which is why I showed going to 80% on fan speed although noisy brought the temperature back down to the 70s which is very very manageable so if you went in there and set up a custom fan profile so that it ramp up and slow down you would get the same result as long as you increase the power Target and the temperature limit and you're not going to allow thermal throttling to have any sort of real uh factor in the way the card is performing unless something's wrong with the cooler then it's going to try and keep itself from dying now I think that the people are making a big deal of this again because of that demo because the reality here is all of the reference cards in the history of the reference cards have done this this is nothing new in fact people wouldn't even be making a point that it's thermal throttling if Nvidia didn't make the point that it's only 67c so I do think there was a mistake made on that that stage where there was a bit of an expectation planted in all of our minds followed by a big dis disappointment when it came to the reality of it's still a reference cooler that cannot keep these temperatures in check with the way they're shipped out of the box you've got to go in there and tweak some settings now the good news is the partner cards are launching literally in a couple of days and you're going to start seeing Custom Designs like obviously from EVGA and gigabyte and MSI and zotek they've all got their multifan heat pipe boohemoth coolers that are going to keep things in check and be a hell of a lot quieter now remember this was in an open air test bench which means the only cooling Factor on the card is the card itself case flow wasn't a factor so if you have a small form factor case or even a regular enclosure of some sort you might even see thermal throttling happening sooner and you might see it come down even farther depending on what your case flow is like so I actually showed you best case scenario here huh no pun intended actually she showed you best case scenario so your results might actually be worse than mine mind anyway guys hope this video has helped shed some light on the thermal throttling that's happening here from Nvidia I'm not by any means saying it's not a big deal because it's happened on the older cards I'm saying I think I think it's a big deal because the temperatures were boasted as being very low and unfortunately that was not the real world scenario but you can play around the fan profiles at the sake of or the sacrifice of noise or just skip the founders Edition all together and go with a custom card cooler uh from the likes of you know all of the board Partners out there with multiple fans or water cool it like I'm going to do and then just go balls to the wall on the clock anyway guys see you in the next video I hope this video has helped anyway time to get out of here bunch of people came at me saying talk about the thermal throttling I've done that I hope you're happy now so you can just zip it and shut it cuz I'm going to go now it's a holiday weekend coming up I'm going to go have some fun see you guys in the next videowhat's up guys jense coming at you with another video and today we are going to talk specifically about the topic of thermal throttling and the GTX 1080 now I can hear you already what do you mean thermal throttling Nvidia showed a demo where it was only running 67c so today we're going to talk about thermal throttling and why pretty much every single reviewer on YouTube with the 1080 was a little bit shocked about the high temperatures that the founders Edition card was demonstrating and I'm going to show you what's happening and pretty much how I got around it with doing my benchmarks cuz a lot of people were like what the hell Jay your temps are not as as high as others were saying so with that said let's get started the master case 5 and master case 5 Pro from Cooler Master combines modularity with creativity giving you the freedom to build it your way make it yours by clicking the link down in the description now what is thermal throttling now if you're really new you probably have no idea what that is if you're an advanced user you're like yeah know what it is just get on with it so for that there's a little slider bar just click forward if you're you know Advanced user now thermal only exists on CPUs and gpus together where the software or you know the actual controller or bios whatever you want to call it will try to save itself from dying a high temperature death by dialing back both voltages and frequencies to keep the temperatures below a certain Target now the GTX 1080 ships with a temperature Target of 83° c and what that means is is go ahead and ramp up the speed automatically to whatever you want but as soon as it hits 83 oh you better start backing things off to get it in check now when it comes to the Nvidia demonstration obviously they weren't doing live gaming when they hit that 67c while overclocked and for all we know they could have had the fans running at 100% on the card uh again we didn't see the test rig we only saw the Precision overlay showing 67c and 2114 MHz again we have no idea what the load was like we couldn't see CPU load and that was just a 3D rendering uh of a 3D image it wasn't actually playing any games so that's something to keep in in mind so that's why when myself and a lot of other reviewers we all started kind of talking behind the scenes with each other as we were doing our testing like hey are you noticing your card getting really hot and it was like wow I thought it was just mine and it turns out everybody was complaining about high temperatures because we expected it to be a lot lower now 16 NM finfet is a very very small chip and what that means is you're going to have a lot of focus here heat so the idea of 67c underload was really kind of mindboggling because with it being so small and focused we expected the temperatures to actually be kind of hot turns out they uh they kind of are now the folks over at Gamers Nexus actually did a Frankenstein build where they noticed they had high heat so what they did was they ripped a hybrid cooler off of an EVGA card stuck it on their 1080 to see what would happen and if that would fix thermal throttling what I'm going to do today is I'm going to turn around here I'm going to do some live gaming with an overlay I'm going to show you the throttling in progress and then I'm going to show you pretty much what's happening as it's thermal throttling how far it's coming down and then how uh I got around it without having to rip off the cooler and do anything custom but don't worry we are going to be ripping off the cooler because of course I've got my uh GTX 1080 full cover water block from Ek first one off the assembly line baby oh yeah and if you saw that picture that EK sent out with the block on it with the green fluid that was my card and that was this block wow yeah mind blown right transition and all right so we're going to be doing this test here with some Crisis 3 because it's pretty demanding um and I've got the setting set up pretty much to where I would assume people with a 1080 would put it which is very high preset with a 4X msaa and I'm running at 1440p uh so here's what we got we've got OSD here up from afterburner and we've got on the starting from the left here that top left is the power limit that's the percentage of power limit what that means is if it exceeds the number that is preset whether it be 100 uh obviously 100% power envelope if it starts to go higher than that 100% power draw that's set from in the Bios then it's going to start limiting clocks and things to try and keep it under that 100% uh obviously this is our GPU temperature here we're running at 44c in the menu this next one here is our GPU utilization or usage so we're only sitting at 30% utilization in the menu this is the fan speed core clock and then FPS so what we're going to do here is we're going to play the game uh with the GPU sitting here you know not too hot it hasn't heat soaked or anything but I do have the room the room fairly closed up the doors closed the AC vent is off and the window is closed so the temperature in this room is starting to get a little bit of underbob sweat if you know what I'm saying but what we want to pay attention to here is obviously the temperature number and the core clock number I have the other stuff up here so you can see how it relates are we thermaling due to temperature or we thermal throttle or we throttling due to power Target also I want you to keep an eye of what the fan percent Peres here and then GP utilization is pretty much always going to be at 100% but we've got all those numbers up there so that you can see how they're correlating with each other to get a big picture of what's actually happening with the GPU now as you can see we started off here at 1873 MHz it just boosted up right away just boom you can see our power usage here did hit 101 for a second and as you can see when that happens this starts to come down our temperature is nowhere near our Target yet but our power usage is and so that starts to come down so you're going to notice a few few things happening here it all it's a balancing act on the way throttling actually works with the graphics card it's not always temperature related but more often than not it could be now I have a couple of profiles set up here too which 100% out of the box which is what you're seeing right now and then I have another profile set up no overclocking or anything it's just power Target or power limit and our uh temperature threshold and what that will do is I will increase the temperature from the factory setting of 83 which is where it will start the thermal throttle and then we're going to raise that up to 92 and then I have got the power limit set to 120% so we can exceed the power envelope designed by Nvidia by 20% before it starts to pull back power due to power draw as you can see while I'm just sitting here talking our temperature has raised up to 78c and our core clock has dropped already from 1870 range down to 1810 but that's still higher than the advertised 1733 boost clock but you can see now we're dipping down in the 1700s but as you can see just that little bit of a battle we're down to 1721 our power limit is only at 85 82 it's not even at 100 but you can see our thermals is sitting at 82 so we are now thermal throttling so we've come all the way down to 1645 for a second there so we're almost down to the base clock now all right well now you can see we're all the way down to 1620 between 1645 and 1620 so we've pretty much lost our boost clock now and we're pretty soon are going to hit 1607 so what I'm going to do now is I'm simply going to change my profile here and as you can see by by changing my profile by letting the power Target go up and the temperature Target go up we immediately went all the way back to se 1797 and as you can see we're not even throttling anymore well okay it bounce around a little bit but you can see the fan speeds come up a little bit temperatures come up to 86 we're past that and power limit has gone above 100% now but look at what the clock is doing the clock is staying much more stable and I just died again but look at that temperature still or the core clock is still sitting at 1785 but the temperatures have have gone up obviously a couple of degrees but you can see if you give it just a little bit of extra temperature Headroom it will actually go up pretty high on the core clock so all the way back up to 1797 again now what I want to point out here is the GPU is sitting at 66% fan speed but it's actually really quiet it's so much quieter than the other cards typically are so now one other thing I want to do real quick just to just to see obviously here is I'm going to open up after burner and I'm going to put the fan manually to what I did in my test which was 80% so the fan speed kicked up a little bit more the noise came up a little bit obviously you can see the fan speed is now at 80% but keep an eye on the temperature is right there do you see how now we're sitting straight at 1797 and it's not even moving now if we take a look right here at our core clock as you can see it is just bouncing all over the place it started off nice and high 1873 where we started the video and then it came all the way back down into very low 1620 which is barely above bo uh the base clock of 16007 and then it's still just bouncing all around but the second I increased right here this to 120 and the temperature limit to 92 it didn't reach 92 as you can see the highest temperature was 87 yeah still very very hot but I want to point out that right here you can see that we just stuck to 1797 boom it no longer throttled anymore so it definitely is thermal based on the way the core clock are kind of bouncing all around transition okay so then why is this such a big deal well quite honestly I think Nvidia made the mistake of showing that 3D rendering demo and then pointing at the screen and saying but it only run 67c because that was very misleading in my opinion where it's a gamer's card it's not a card that's being boasted as being a productivity card it's a gaming card and you put a gaming load on it especially with the founders cooler even though it's a vapor chamber with the fan profile that they have set up it will thermal throttle and it will thermal throttle back down to practically its base clock but as you can see by changing the temperature Target and changing the power limit we were able to bypass that and then get all the way up to 1,800 what well 1797 MHz on my card and it only went up to about 87c now I say only because I allowed it to go to 92 but it didn't get there so what that means is the thermal throttling is happening right at the upper echelon of where the limits are for that cooler now the other thing you could obviously do which is why I showed going to 80% on fan speed although noisy brought the temperature back down to the 70s which is very very manageable so if you went in there and set up a custom fan profile so that it ramp up and slow down you would get the same result as long as you increase the power Target and the temperature limit and you're not going to allow thermal throttling to have any sort of real uh factor in the way the card is performing unless something's wrong with the cooler then it's going to try and keep itself from dying now I think that the people are making a big deal of this again because of that demo because the reality here is all of the reference cards in the history of the reference cards have done this this is nothing new in fact people wouldn't even be making a point that it's thermal throttling if Nvidia didn't make the point that it's only 67c so I do think there was a mistake made on that that stage where there was a bit of an expectation planted in all of our minds followed by a big dis disappointment when it came to the reality of it's still a reference cooler that cannot keep these temperatures in check with the way they're shipped out of the box you've got to go in there and tweak some settings now the good news is the partner cards are launching literally in a couple of days and you're going to start seeing Custom Designs like obviously from EVGA and gigabyte and MSI and zotek they've all got their multifan heat pipe boohemoth coolers that are going to keep things in check and be a hell of a lot quieter now remember this was in an open air test bench which means the only cooling Factor on the card is the card itself case flow wasn't a factor so if you have a small form factor case or even a regular enclosure of some sort you might even see thermal throttling happening sooner and you might see it come down even farther depending on what your case flow is like so I actually showed you best case scenario here huh no pun intended actually she showed you best case scenario so your results might actually be worse than mine mind anyway guys hope this video has helped shed some light on the thermal throttling that's happening here from Nvidia I'm not by any means saying it's not a big deal because it's happened on the older cards I'm saying I think I think it's a big deal because the temperatures were boasted as being very low and unfortunately that was not the real world scenario but you can play around the fan profiles at the sake of or the sacrifice of noise or just skip the founders Edition all together and go with a custom card cooler uh from the likes of you know all of the board Partners out there with multiple fans or water cool it like I'm going to do and then just go balls to the wall on the clock anyway guys see you in the next video I hope this video has helped anyway time to get out of here bunch of people came at me saying talk about the thermal throttling I've done that I hope you're happy now so you can just zip it and shut it cuz I'm going to go now it's a holiday weekend coming up I'm going to go have some fun see you guys in the next video\n"