Scored a MSI 3080 Ventus, some regrets...

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May 20, 2011
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Scored a MSI 3080 Ventus today, I should be thrilled but after reading up on it I'm worried. 320w hard power limit. PL slider is maxed out at 100%, no headroom to increase it. Anyone with more knowledge on Ampere know how badly this will effect performance? I enjoy overclocking, getting the most out of the hardware. Seems like I got the worst card for that. Everything I read says these cards are power starved, and most cards have 360w+ power limits.

My only hope is to do a bios flash, not interested in shunt mods. Not a lot of information out there but one person said that no matter the bios used, the power limit was always stuck at 320w.

Have a day to cancel my order, but I'm pretty sure I can sell it here if its not what I expected. At least I got it for MSRP.
 
You aren't going to gain much from an oc. The 3K series runs pretty high boost clocks as is so any more mhz is more for benchmark scoring rights than any really useful gains in fps.
 
Maybe you can flash a different bios with a higher power limit? That's what I did with my Zotac 3090. Put it at 390w, up from 350w.
 
Maybe you can flash a different bios with a higher power limit? That's what I did with my Zotac 3090. Put it at 390w, up from 350w.
I plan to, but like I said above I found 2 on another forum claiming that other bios's with higher power limits did not increase power consumption or performance. Its not so much about the oc as it is maintaining a stable boost clock.
 
Yea the bump to 390w only got about 600 points in Time Spy. It really isn't worth it.
 
Oops and sorry OP. I didn't read carefully enough. That's weird the bios flash doesn't work though. But it really isn't worth it like I and others said above. You should just enjoy the card. My 3090 even bone stock isn't working very hard in most games. I do only have a 60hz display ( 4k TV) so that's part of it (and an Oculus Rift S).
 
I had a 3090XC3 and have a 3090FTW3 in my system now. Performance is near identical. The avg boost clock on the XC3 was 1980... and the average boost clock on the FTW3 is... 1980.

I can push the slider up and draw more power, 365W avg vs 460w avg and get a few hundred points better in superposition and a few hundred points more in time spy. The FTW3 can run 2100mhz boost lock for me, but once again, diminishing returns for near 500w draw and a WD Legion score difference of 1-2 fps.
 
I had a 3090XC3 and have a 3090FTW3 in my system now. Performance is near identical. The avg boost clock on the XC3 was 1980... and the average boost clock on the FTW3 is... 1980.

I can push the slider up and draw more power, 365W avg vs 460w avg and get a few hundred points better in superposition and a few hundred points more in time spy. The FTW3 can run 2100mhz boost lock for me, but once again, diminishing returns for near 500w draw and a WD Legion score difference of 1-2 fps.
Good information, thanks! I'll be heavily CPU bottlenecked anyway till I can find a 5900x. Time to give the 5960x all's its got.
 
I had a 3090XC3 and have a 3090FTW3 in my system now. Performance is near identical. The avg boost clock on the XC3 was 1980... and the average boost clock on the FTW3 is... 1980.

I can push the slider up and draw more power, 365W avg vs 460w avg and get a few hundred points better in superposition and a few hundred points more in time spy. The FTW3 can run 2100mhz boost lock for me, but once again, diminishing returns for near 500w draw and a WD Legion score difference of 1-2 fps.
So if you could do it over again which would you buy?
 
I'd stick to the xc3 or cheapest model of 3k series. After testing around, ampere is not like the 2k series. OC headroom is non existent nor meaningful for the power draw it requires.
 
Scored a MSI 3080 Ventus today, I should be thrilled but after reading up on it I'm worried. 320w hard power limit. PL slider is maxed out at 100%, no headroom to increase it. Anyone with more knowledge on Ampere know how badly this will effect performance? I enjoy overclocking, getting the most out of the hardware. Seems like I got the worst card for that. Everything I read says these cards are power starved, and most cards have 360w+ power limits.

My only hope is to do a bios flash, not interested in shunt mods. Not a lot of information out there but one person said that no matter the bios used, the power limit was always stuck at 320w.

Have a day to cancel my order, but I'm pretty sure I can sell it here if its not what I expected. At least I got it for MSRP.
The point of any OC in the past was that for stability reasons the mfrs left headroom on the table. It was fun to OC and squeak out a bit more performance than advertised. NVidia literally did that for you with this 'paper launch' - you effectively got an already OC card when you bought it.

They did this because of a perceived need to capture 'mindshare'. They wanted to beat AMD to the table, and sent out just enough cards to do that. They'll probably not have much stock in any of the currently announced 8nm cards. Once they shift to TSMCs 7nm process and rebrand the new process cards as something else ('Ti' etc) with more memory on board -- those cards will be on shelves in brick and mortar locations... not the current ones like you got.
 
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I got a MSI 3080 Ventus yesterday too. Haven't personally found a need to OC, but glad to view this thread to see the limitations. Going from a Radeon VII, the card adds a significant smoothness to things and being 1440p until I can afford a new monitor, I think I'll be set at stock speeds for a good while.
 
Even if you get the other cards, the OC on these cards are not something you want to write home about. Enjoy the card!
 
Undervolting seems to be the only solution for this particular card. Again it's not about the overclock for max mhz, it's about have a nice stable boost clock. Because this card has the lowest power limit of any 3080, it hits that limit more frequently, causing the boost clock to jump all over the place. We're talking 100-200mhz swings while gaming. This causes frame rate to fluctuate.

Undervolting will keep the card from hitting the power limit as often. Of coarse this means you have to lower the clock offset lowering boost clocks. Disappointing but we're taking 3-5% performance hit.
 
Don't give up yet! I just got this card, a renewed one from MSI. Stock clock is 1740mhz boosted on the Ventus.
I noticed the 3080 12gb Suprim X has a boost clock of 1890mhz.
Memory clock of the two is the same.

Biggest difference is the Suprim X has a power rating of 390W with a +10% allowance of overclocking.

Both have internal device ID: 10DE 220A

I flashed the Suprim X bios onto the Ventus successfully.

Now the Ventus has a higher power rating and a higher stock clock.

I currently am using MSI Afterburner to underclock the core at 1830mhz.

Memory is overclocked by +850mhz

And my power limit is set to 410W. During use, I only see about 400W at max.

Haven't fully benchmarked yet but have played plenty of demanding games to assume it's fairly stable.
 
Undervolting seems to be the only solution for this particular card. Again it's not about the overclock for max mhz, it's about have a nice stable boost clock. Because this card has the lowest power limit of any 3080, it hits that limit more frequently, causing the boost clock to jump all over the place. We're talking 100-200mhz swings while gaming. This causes frame rate to fluctuate.

Undervolting will keep the card from hitting the power limit as often. Of coarse this means you have to lower the clock offset lowering boost clocks. Disappointing but we're taking 3-5% performance hit.
I was seeing this as well, at 95% usage, I was seeing 10-20 fps drops at 80⁰C. Card currently runs cooler, believe it or not. Stays around 76⁰C with no throttling.
 
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