The Power Limit Slider Experiment: Pushing the Limits of the RTX 3080 Ti

As I sat down to test the power draw and performance of my RTX 3080 Ti, I knew that one thing was going to be annoyingly loud - the power supply. To mitigate this issue, I decided to take a different approach than usual. Instead of using the usual power limit slider, which can sometimes lead to instability, I chose to simply lower the power draw limit on the RTX 3080 Ti's power supply slider and see what would happen.

I carefully adjusted the power limit slider, allowing the RTX 3080 Ti to draw a significantly reduced amount of power. To my surprise, the system not only didn't crash but continued to run smoothly, drawing around 110 watts of power. This was a far cry from the usual 450-500 watts required by more powerful graphics cards.

However, I knew that this was just a temporary measure and that we needed to push the limits further to see what would happen. So, I decided to slowly increase the power draw limit on the RTX 3080 Ti's power supply slider until the system crashed. As expected, it wasn't long before the system began to struggle with the increased power draw.

Despite my initial concerns about stability, the RTX 3080 Ti performed remarkably well in this test. Even at a reduced power draw of around 110 watts, I was able to achieve high frame rates in games like Battlefield V. In fact, increasing the power draw limit further allowed me to push even higher frame rates.

The performance results were astonishing - going from around 60 frames per second at 1080p to over 100 frames per second at 4K ultra settings. It was clear that the RTX 3080 Ti had finally found its sweet spot, and I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and satisfaction as I watched the system perform so well.

However, it soon became apparent that there were some limitations to this high-performance setup. As I continued to increase the power draw limit, I realized that the 5,300G CPU was starting to become a bottleneck at 4K resolution. The temperatures on the RTX 3080 Ti also began to rise, and I knew that I needed to address these issues if I wanted to continue pushing the limits of this system.

To fix these problems, I decided to replace the old CPU with a newer model, one that was better suited to handling high-performance workloads like those generated by the RTX 3080 Ti. After installing the new CPU and applying some thermal paste, I carefully adjusted the power limit slider once again, allowing the system to draw even more power from the RTX 3080 Ti.

This time, however, I was determined to push the limits of the system even further. As I gradually increased the power draw limit, I began to notice that the system's performance started to degrade at higher resolutions. The new CPU and thermal paste seemed to have improved things significantly, but there were still some limitations to be explored.

One of the most significant surprises came when I realized that the 5,300G CPU was no longer able to handle even 4K ultra settings without struggling. As a result, I was forced to increase the power draw limit once again, this time reaching levels of around 75 watts per hour. It was clear that the RTX 3080 Ti's performance capabilities were still far from fully realized.

In conclusion, my experiment with the power limit slider on the RTX 3080 Ti has been a wild ride. From reducing the power draw to pushing the limits even further, I've seen some remarkable improvements in both performance and efficiency. However, it's also become clear that there are still some limitations to be explored, particularly when it comes to the compatibility of different components within this system.

One thing is for certain - the RTX 3080 Ti has proven itself to be an incredibly powerful graphics card, one that can deliver outstanding performance even under the most demanding conditions. However, as I continue to explore and experiment with this system, I'm also starting to realize just how difficult it can be to push its limits without sacrificing stability or compromise on performance.

The power supply, in particular, has become a major concern. With only a single PCIe power cable available for the RTX 3080 Ti, I've noticed that the system's power draw becomes increasingly unstable as the graphics card pushes higher and higher levels of power. This can lead to issues with the power supply itself, potentially even causing it to fail altogether.

This experience has made me realize just how crucial proper power supply design is when working with high-performance components like the RTX 3080 Ti. A well-designed power supply system that can handle the demands of this graphics card without compromising stability or performance will be essential if we want to continue pushing its limits in future experiments.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enpreviously on dawid does tech stuff: it's not firing up with the 1070 in it either  oh no i killed it it's the 3080ti was too much for it and the power supply just committed hara  caring which brings me to today's video where i got my hands on a beefier power supply for the  msi system all the way from japan so that i can do everything in my power to get that 3080ti to  run terribly in this msi system even if it costs me my fingers ah but before that it's time for a  word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by be quiet and their pure loop aios  now it goes without saying that the pure loop aios are easy to mount come in a variety of sizes and  with its unique pump design is surprisingly quiet for an aio but what i like most about these aios  is their minimalist aesthetic i think they look real sexy with that brushed metal faceplate and  that diffused white led and considering that you don't have to pay ridiculous rgb tax on these  they are surprisingly affordable and they have a fill port on an aio which i think is really cool  so if you like the look of these check out the pure loop aios using the link in my  description below and thank you again be quiet for sponsoring today's videonow a lot of you are probably thinking darvit that is just a 600 watt power supply which  really is not a great pairing for an rtx 380 ti but the main reason i got it is because i really  like triggering garys so for the type of person that gets offended by this power supply choice  look at it look at it no actually the real reason is this was just the best option i could get  fsp does make an 850 watt flex power supply but it's got the same problem that i think is going to  be the issue for the silverstone power supply that we'll discuss in a little bit and it's longer than  the power supply that came in the msi system and i didn't want to risk it not fitting in the case now  another interesting thing about this silverstone power supply is that it's got a cybernetics  platinum rating which may just sound like a kirkland brand 80 plus rating but cybernetics  actually has a more comprehensive test suite that the power supply needs to pass in order to get the  rating so i actually think this is better than 80 plus okay so let's have a closer look at the  power supply we're going to use to torture an rtx 3080 ti with wow that is not super well packaged  now it comes with quite a standard japanese power cord here with the little extraneous ground cable  pull that off and oh it's so cute and little now on the back we have a worryingly small fan  i think this is gonna just be inappropriately noisy but we'll see how that goes  and then uh we've got a non-modular power supply now the msi system does actually have  some proprietary connectors on the motherboard for power but i did get an adapter off of amazon so we  should still be able to use this power supply now this power supply does have a 50 amp 12 volt rail  on it which i'm hoping will be able to handle a bottlenecked 3080ti uh but we'll see how it  goes you know we'll see what happens all i hope is that it doesn't explode under any form of load  so that we can like underclock and underpower the gpu that it in a way that it does work but now  that we've had a very brief look at this little power supply let's drop it into the msi system  and just hope that when the previous power supply died it didn't just take the whole system with it  now if you have a closer look at this motherboard you can see that it looks like it's just a  slightly extended standard itx motherboard which means that if the previous power  supply did kill this motherboard we may be able to just replace it like if you drop  an itx motherboard over it you can see the the screw holes do actually line up for it  oh yeah don't you just love a nice proprietary connectornow you can see here that the silverstone power supply board is actually smaller  than the one that's in here hopefully i can get it mounted decently do this  okay well that's not ideal now after evaluating various options i think the ghettoist solution  is going to be the best i'm just going to kind of leave it resting like this because with the  pc the right way up it's just going to be wedged down by that plate which there's very little  clearance so it is actually going to kind of hold it in place yeah why not let's let's sort the  cables out and then see if the system runs which went well oh it's such a small hole please ah  come on oh that's just one ahnow considering that we have the predictably inconvenient proprietary motherboard power  we're gonna need this adapter which is a 24 pin to 10 pin cable in order to get that uh  that silverstone power supply to work in here okay well that all looks fine to me  so let's close it up and find out if that power supply took its family with it on its way outi think it killed the whole system on its way out ah well that's a shame i'm i'm pretty sure  the actual core system in here has died the next step is to replace it with a newer itx motherboard  now i think if we can remove this hard drive cage it'll make it a whole lot easier to get  that motherboard out now i do think that it is removable because i've already undone a  couple of screws holding it in place but it's not coming undone yet uh so maybe  there are a couple of more screws under here that we need to get out wait so under this top panel  which i didn't even realize was removable there's a hidden hot-swappable ssd caddy  who designed this case why did they hide two hot-swappable hard drive caddies  under the dvd drive that's hidden under the top panel  this is such a ridiculous pc holy crap because of all of this proprietaryness this is definitely  not going to be a clean transplant but you know you never know until you try  okay so after about two years of struggling here is the slightly deformed itx motherboard you can  have a closer look at all of the proprietary connectors we've got the 10 pin over here  we've got some proprietary fan connectors over here at least all of the sata was standard but  here we've got a bunch of like front panel connectors and stuff now i quickly want to  test this motherboard outside of the case with a known working power supply just to make sure that  it did actually suffer death by 3080ti because i don't see any obvious signs of motherboard failure  like scorch marks around the power delivery or anything like that a few moments later no it did  that's actually not the driest looking thermal base okay well there's a big problem uh  msi you just yeah couldn't have made this harder could you because of the fact that  the cpu socket is oriented differently on this motherboard and you can see  that it's actually further away from the rear i o because of those factors it means that this cooler  it can't fit on that because even if you have less obstruction over here and you can actually  get the cooler to mount it actually overhangs the back of the motherboard so it's not gonna work  so long story short our options are getting more limited here and i think our best bet is probably  going to be to use a motherboard with just like a standard cooler on it something like this  stock amd cooler which actually is lower profile than this coolers high point the problem is that  this cooler is just going to be asphyxiated by the back of the gpu so the temperatures are  going to be horrendous in here but i i don't know what other options i have at this point  would you look at that at least the screw holes line up so the pcie bracket actually  plugged in which is good uh although we do not have a whole lot of clearance as you can see  my finger can barely fit between the bracket and the top of the fan and not  only that but the rtx 3080ti founders edition card has a rear blowing fan  which is very possibly just gonna be dumping a bunch of heat into the cpu cooler so hopefully  we don't cause some silicone fusion today but let's reassemble the system and see how that goesokay now this is some real satan level design decision making here because  they take a standard connector right this connector is what a front panel connector  looks like in a case like an nzxt one uh so you think like oh that may actually fit  but what they've done is they've just shrunken it ever so slightly down from standard so that  it looks like a standard connector but it doesn't actually fit on anything useful now  the reason that this whole power button fiasco is so irritating is that once we have a graphics  card in here we're not just gonna be able to screwdriver savage power on the system because  there's a graphics card in the way now what i've done in order to get around msi's evil ways  is i just stole the power button from a different case so that i can position this somewhere more  easily accessible inside this pre-built case i don't know i feel like that isn't looking  too bad so yeah let's just drop the graphics card back in here and then test it i guesshey would you look at that the cpu cooler actually has a bit of room to breathe that's enough rightnice that sounds good you can see things are spinning in there yay successoh it shot down again well the battlefield 5 menus are clearly just way too much for  these flex power supplies but considering that we've got some some motherboard rgb  still going i think that the power supply didn't die this time so that's a good startokay nice there we go it's not dead this time which is a genuine improvement over  the previous configuration so now now we can start playing around with the power limits on that gpu  and then maybe we can get it to a point where it can run battlefield  5's menus which really would be the dream that power supply is really annoyingly loud so all  i'm going to do here is take the power limit slider and just kind of just do that with it  i mean i could if i wasn't a complete savage under vault of the gpu uh but let's see if this works  and then we'll we'll take it from there so as you can see it is drawing a whole lot less poweroh come on it's crashed again what the hell okay well let's just do that okay there we go  it's drawing 110 watts now like it the power supply has to be able to handle this right  okay well at 110 watts the system's not crashed yet so that's good that's a step in the right  direction our rtx 3080 ti is drawing just 110 ish watts and we're getting 210 megahertz of core  frequency going uh but we're we're still getting about 60 frames per second in battlefield 5 which  interestingly enough battlefield 5 is actually performing worse now than it did with the 1070  but that's not the point of this video we've got we've got a bigger graphics card name number in  the system that's the only thing we care about and um the system's actually running so i think  what i'm going to do now is slowly pull up that slider in msi afterburner until the pc crashesoh that's made a considerable performance difference and it's not increased our power draw  that much so that's interesting going from 110 ish to 140ish has given us more than double the fps  okay so the power draw to performance metric of the rtx 3080 ti is definitely not a linear graph  and i think now it's actually running better than it did on the 1070 if i'm not mistakenokay so that's made quite a big difference to our power draw figure but our frame rates it's  a little bit better it's not much better though now clearly the reason we're not  getting more performance is because that 5300 g is a bottleneck here i'm not quite sure why  it's drawing so little power in this situation but either way let's replace the cpu in there  and see if we can get more performance out of the system holy that is glued on there oh whoaoh there we go wow that thermal paste is dry as hell that is definitely one of the reasons  the temperatures were struggling even with a low power draw that all makes sense now  now even with that new cpu in there and just a 58 power draw limit on the rtx 3080 ti  we've had to bump up the resolution from 1080p to 4k just so that we don't run into a cpu bottleneck  but now that we are at 4k ultra settings uh we're still getting about 110 frames per second and it's  it's running well everything seems to be okay so let's let's bump up the power draw a little  bit and see how it goes oh yeah we're actually already getting to a point again at 4k where the  3600 is a bottleneck so that's wow that is crazy the the 3080ti even when heavily kneecapped is  still a complete monster where the power supply is gonna tap out so let's see when we hit thatoof that that cpu is not having a good time anymore  there's someone with me oh there we go 75 is just too much for it at this point so at the end of the  day i think the reason why flex power supplies crumble neath the mighty tread of an rtx 3080 ti  is because the ones that i've found only have a single pcie power cable  that splits off to dual eight pins making it easy for the graphics card to overdraw the  cable and lead to power supply death which brings me to the end of the video bye you