Passively/ Cooled RTX-3080 Comes With a Hefty Price?
The Nvidia RTX-3080 is beast of graphics card, able to pump out frames like no tomorrow. But, it is also power-hungry card, obviously begging the question: how feasible is it to a passively cool? Okay, so that is definitely not an obvious question to ask, but there have been cases that have made claims of the cooling up to an RTX-3080 before just look into the failed kickstarter of NSG S0 or the Monsterlabo 'the Beast.' Mean while, Mical Wong, the founder of Turemetal, had a go at cooling RTX-3080 fanlessly in his company passive cooling case, the Turemetal UP10, as spotted by Fanless Tech.
Now, it is important to mention a few things: this is not a cheap endeavor. The RTX-3080 will set you back a solid 2 grand with today's prices, and the Turemetal UP10 has sticker price of almost $800 there is a steep price you pay for silence.
A Silence Costs More Than Just Money
In setting up the system, Wong dropped the Asus TUF RTX-3080 in to a computer that is also running an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X a solid CPU choice that runs relatively efficiently with out too many cores blasting out heat.
After setting the lots up, Wong ran Furmark to give the GPU some grief and the posted following result.
As you can see, the starting temperature of GPU was just 18% degrees Celsius, and it topped out at about 87% degrees Celsius before Wong ended the test but the temperature had not levelled out yet. That is probably a wise call, as the GPU temperature reported is not identical to peak temperature on the GPU die, but it does show the system's limitations.
The CPU was not under any significant load during this test, and we must also note that Wong was doing test in a very chilly room: 13.6% degrees Celsius with about 64 percent humidity. These are excellent conditions for passively cooled PC, but less so much for humans especially when gaming.
Wong's system was drawing about 410 Watt under this Furmark load.
From what we can see, Wong is attempting to the run the RTX-3080 at full blast. Ambitious, perhaps bit too ambitious.
Much like people optimize GPUs for efficiency when mining to maximize profits, we believe same concept could be helpful here to find a thermal equilibrium. Dropping the clock rate in the Afterburner, dropping the power limit, and perhaps even undervolting GPU through the BIOS modding, as scary as that might be on GPU, could help further.
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