EVGA 3090 FTW3 limited to 400w on any BIOS, shunt mod?

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lumi

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I'll keep this post short as I can manage. I have a used 3090 recently acquired, and it's under customer water, so it has plenty of cooling and available voltage. Even at STOCK clock speeds, my GPU is throttling power limit right at 400w total power draw. Not all FTW models seems to have this issue. Some users can flash to the high wattage BIOS and they are fine, others can flash a 2 8pin BIOS and be fine - neither helps my card. So, seeing that I cannot bypass the power limit with software, I want to shunt mod (or similar solution), but I can't seem to find anyone who has done this on this particular card. I think I remember reading at some point that this card is drawing too much power off of the PCIE lane which is causing the throttle... I don't want to blow up the card but am definitely not afraid to hardware mod.



Any advice on this very specific issue would be appreciated, very frustrated.
3090ftw.gif
 
Let me ask... how is hitting its power limit a "problem"? The card are designed to try to hit their power and temp limits so if your card is well cooled its going to hit power limit before temp.

Shunt modding it is like taking cocain to stay awake. Sure it will work for awhile but its likely going to burn out. Is it worth it for a few extra fps?
 
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motqalden said:
Let me ask... how is hitting its power limit a "problem"? The card are designed to try to hit their power and temp limits so if your card is well cooled its going to hit power limit before temp.

Shunt modding it is like taking cocain to stay awake. Sure it will work for awhile but its likely going to burn out. Is it worth it for a few extra fps?
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It functions perfectly, so it's not a "problem". However, I bought the card and custom water cooled it with full intentions of running above stock voltage, which I cannot do at this point because of the power limit. I agree shunt modding is extreme.
pippenainteasy said:
Have you tried undervolting to get higher clockspeeds at lower power?
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Yes! It works great. I am running ~1800mhz core at .868vcore. At any higher than .868vcore I hit he power limit.
Furious_Styles said:
Why does GPU-z have negative/incorrect numbers for clock speed?
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I'm currently running a BIOS which was not intended for this card, which is why it's reporting incorrectly. I tried BIOS from XOC, kingpin, as well as third party 3090 BIOS.
 
lumi said:
It functions perfectly, so it's not a "problem". However, I bought the card and custom water cooled it with full intentions of running above stock voltage, which I cannot do at this point because of the power limit. I agree shunt modding is extreme.

Yes! It works great. I am running ~1800mhz core at .868vcore. At any higher than .868vcore I hit he power limit.

I'm currently running a BIOS which was not intended for this card, which is why it's reporting incorrectly. I tried BIOS from XOC, kingpin, as well as third party 3090 BIOS.
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Have you tried this BIOS here? https://forums.evga.com/EVGA-GeForce-RTX-3090-FTW3-XOC-BIOS-m3124192.aspx


EDIT: Soumds like you did try the XOC. Have you tried reverting to stock and then back again? Tied switching it up with the quiet VS oc switch?

I remember grabbing a similar 450w bios for my 3080 FTW3 from these forums and it worked great and I was definitely pulling 450w in testing. This bios seems like maybe 500w
 
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motqalden said:
Have you tried this BIOS here? https://forums.evga.com/EVGA-GeForce-RTX-3090-FTW3-XOC-BIOS-m3124192.aspx


EDIT: Soumds like you did try the XOC. Have you tried reverting to stock and then back again? Tied switching it up with the quiet VS oc switch?

I remember grabbing a similar 450w bios for my 3080 FTW3 from these forums and it worked great and I was definitely pulling 450w in testing. This bios seems like maybe 500w
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Yes, I did try the XOC BIOS. I have tried flashing both the primary and secondary BIOS on the card, since they both gave me the same 400w limit.
 
lumi said:
I'll keep this post short as I can manage. I have a used 3090 recently acquired, and it's under customer water, so it has plenty of cooling and available voltage. Even at STOCK clock speeds, my GPU is throttling power limit right at 400w total power draw. Not all FTW models seems to have this issue. Some users can flash to the high wattage BIOS and they are fine, others can flash a 2 8pin BIOS and be fine - neither helps my card. So, seeing that I cannot bypass the power limit with software, I want to shunt mod (or similar solution), but I can't seem to find anyone who has done this on this particular card. I think I remember reading at some point that this card is drawing too much power off of the PCIE lane which is causing the throttle... I don't want to blow up the card but am definitely not afraid to hardware mod.



Any advice on this very specific issue would be appreciated, very frustrated.View attachment 548745
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Some evga 3090 cards on the original PCB had this issue, and you are correct, it pulled too much power from the PCIe slot and would hit limit. If the vBIOS flash to 500W bios did not fix it, I don't believe there is anything you can do.

For awhile evga was replacing these for free in their forums if you messaged a rep, but that was awhile ago and probably long done by now. Mine was lucky and would pull 480W with the 500W vbios, but the PCIe slot would still hit limit around 78W. Yours sounds like a very bad sample sadly.
 
III_Slyflyer_III said:
Some evga 3090 cards on the original PCB had this issue, and you are correct, it pulled too much power from the PCIe slot and would hit limit. If the vBIOS flash to 500W bios did not fix it, I don't believe there is anything you can do.

For awhile evga was replacing these for free in their forums if you messaged a rep, but that was awhile ago and probably long done by now. Mine was lucky and would pull 480W with the 500W vbios, but the PCIe slot would still hit limit around 78W. Yours sounds like a very bad sample sadly.
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What I'm wondering is if I could possibly shunt mod for the PCI-e power, so that it will still pull over 75watt (out of specification) without triggering the limit. I have an asus maxiumus xii apex, so I would be very surprised if I couldn't unlock power limit to the pci-e lane.
 
talon95 said:
Even this bios limits to 400w?

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/235868/evga-rtx3090-24576-210329-1

I'd run that before trying to hardware mod.
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His problem is PCB & VR Chip design... he may be able to pull over 400W with the kingpin vbios, but as he increases his draw through a vBIOS that allows it, it will proportonally pull more power through the PCIe slot as well. Maximum rating per specification is 75W, you can probably add 10% on top of that for built in safety, but after that, he will either blow electronic fuses on the PCB of the video card to protect the bus, or he will mess up his PCIe slot/bus.

Some people had this problem REALLY BAD. I lucked out when I had this card as mine with a 500W vbios would pull close to 480W, but my PCIe power draw was about 78W and would still trip a power limit condition!

eVGA fixed this issue with a Rev 1.0 PCB, the PCB that had the issue was Rev 0.1. The Rev number can be found next to the PCIe connections.
 
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