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Power, Temperature, & Noise — The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder’s Edition Review: Bigger Pascal for Better Performance

by Ryan Smithon March 9, 2017 9:00 AM EST

  • Posted in
  • GPUs
  • GeForce
  • NVIDIA
  • Pascal

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161 Comments

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ReviewMeet the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder’s EditionSecond Generation GDDR5X: More Memory BandwidthDriver Performance & The TestRise of the Tomb RaiderDiRT RallyAshes of the SingularityBattlefield 4Crysis 3The Witcher 3The DivisionGrand Theft Auto VHitmanComputeSyntheticsPower, Temperature, & NoiseFinal Words

As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.

GeForce Video Card Voltages
GTX 1080 Ti Boost GTX 1080 Boost GTX 980 Ti Boost GTX 1080 Ti Idle
1.062v 1.062v 1.187v 0.65v

Starting with voltages, there aren’t any big surprises with the GTX 1080 Ti. The underlying GP102 GPU has the same load voltages as the GP104 GPU in the GTX 1080, resulting in a load voltage of 1.062v.

Moving on, let’s take a look at average clockspeeds. The GTX 1080 Ti’s official base and boost clockspeeds are lower than the GTX 1080’s, but as we’ve seen before with other NVIDIA video cards, the actual clockspeeds are a little more variable and almost always higher than NVIDIA’s official values. Consequently the GTX 1080 Ti’s clockspeeds may on average trail the GTX 1080 less than what the specifications say.

GeForce Video Card Average Clockspeeds
Game GTX 1080 Ti GTX 1080
Max Boost Clock

1898MHz

1898MHz
Tomb Raider

1620MHz

1721MHz
DiRT Rally

1721MHz

1771MHz
Ashes

1680MHz

1759MHz
Battlefield 4

1657MHz

1771MHz
Crysis 3

1632MHz

1759MHz
The Witcher 3

1645MHz

1759MHz
The Division

1645MHz

1721MHz
Grand Theft Auto V

1746MHz

1797MHz
Hitman

1657MHz

1771MHz

On the whole, the GTX 1080 Ti does average lower clockspeeds than the GTX 1080. Whereas the latter would frequently average clockspeeds in the 1700MHz range, the GTX 1080 Ti averages clockspeeds in the 1600MHz range. This, in part, is why NVIDIA is promoting the GTX 1080 Ti as being 35% faster than the GTX 1080, despite the card having a 40% advantage in total hardware units.

It is interesting to note though that our GTX 1080 Ti sample has the same maximum boost clock as the GTX 1080: 1898MHz. If the GTX 1080 Ti didn’t hit its thermal limit as often, it likely would come even closer to the GTX 1080 in average clockspeeds.

Moving on to power consumption, we’ll start as always with idle power. All told, there are no surprises here. GTX 1080 Ti’s idle power consumption is right next to GTX 980 Ti, which is where we’d expect it given the 250W design.

System power consumption under Crysis 3 is also right where we’d expect it to be for the GTX 1080 Ti. In absolute terms it’s second only to the R9 Fury X – which is to say that it’s high – but as Crysis 3 is a real-world test, power numbers here are influenced by the rest of the system. The faster the card, the more work required of the CPU, RAM, etc, and that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Switching over to FurMark, which is a much more GPU-focused test, we find that our GTX 1080 Ti-equipped testbed draws 394W at the wall. This is a smidge higher than the GTX 980 Ti, but not meaningfully so. All 3 250W NVIDIA cards are closely clustered together, showing that NVIDIA’s power throttling is working as expected, and at the levels expected. GTX 1080 Ti is rated for 70W higher than the GTX 1080, and our results back this rating up. With NVIDIA’s well-established power/performance tiers, GTX 1080 Ti makes the expected leap in power consumption in order to reach its loftier performance target.

Moving on to temperatures, at idle the GTX 1080 Ti settles at 30C, the same as its siblings.

As for Crysis 3, the GTX 1080 Ti ends up being the hottest card here despite the cooling improvements, though it should be noted that this is intentional. While NVIDIA doesn’t publish this information directly, the GTX 1080 Ti’s preset thermal throttle point is 84C, which is a degree or two higher than on NVIDIA’s previous cards. As a result, the card reaches equilibrium at a slightly higher temperature than NVIDIA’s other cards.

It’s interesting to note that the throttle point has been slowly creeping up over the years; going back to the original Titan, it was only 80C. As far as reference specification designs go, the higher temperatures improve the efficiency of the cooler. The downside to higher temperatures is that power leakage increases with the temperature. So there’s a careful balancing act here in getting better cooling performance without drowning it out in more leakage-induced heat. In the case of the GTX 1080 Ti, I suspect NVIDIA paid their dues here with the additional MOSFETs, giving them a bit more headroom for leakage.

The story is much the same under FurMark. The GTX 1080 Ti settles at 84C here as well – though it did peak at 86C before reaching equilibrium – showcasing that regardless of the workload, the card always levels out at its thermal throttling point.

Finally we have our look at noise, starting with idle noise. Relative to the GTX 1080 NVIDIA has tweaked the fan curve a bit here, but at idle the GTX 1080 Ti is already below our noise floor.

Moving over to Crysis 3, we find that the GTX 1080 Ti holds a small edge over our other 250W TI-series cards. NVIDIA’s latest card hits 50.3dB, about 1.5dB below the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 780 Ti. This won’t make much of a difference, but it does close the gap between the 250W cards and the GTX 1080 by a bit.

Finally, the situation with FurMark is much the same. The GTX 1080 Ti is still ever so slightly quieter than the other 250W NVIDIA cards, but a few dB louder than the GTX 1080.

Overall, judging from the power and noise characteristics of the GTX 1080 Ti, along with its throttling practices, it looks like NVIDIA invested most of their gains with the improved cooling system in removing more heat from the card itself. With few exceptions, the GTX 1080 Ti thermal throttles before it TDP throttles, and anecdotally, it tends to be closer to its TDP limit than most of the other high-end NVIDIA cards we’ve seen in the past couple of years.

Going back to what NVIDIA said earlier, they are claiming that the GTX 1080 Ti offers the largest performance uplift over its non-TI counterpart. Given that the TDP gap between the GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1080 is actually smaller than the gap between the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 980 Ti – 70W versus 85W – if anything we’d expect this to be smaller. But by investing their gain from the improved cooler in better heat removal, NVIDIA is actually getting the GTX 1080 Ti closer to its performance/TDP limit than the previous generations of Ti cards. The only downside here is that you can only remove the DVI port once, so this isn’t an act that NVIDIA will be able to repeat in the next generation.

Synthetics
Final Words
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ReviewMeet the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder’s EditionSecond Generation GDDR5X: More Memory BandwidthDriver Performance & The TestRise of the Tomb RaiderDiRT RallyAshes of the SingularityBattlefield 4Crysis 3The Witcher 3The DivisionGrand Theft Auto VHitmanComputeSyntheticsPower, Temperature, & NoiseFinal Words

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NVidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition Review & Thermal Analysis | GamersNexus

NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU & FET Temperatures

Our thermal tests are up first. For these benchmarks, we’re measuring MOSFET temperature in the middle of the board and at the bottom of the board – so that’ll be FETs 2 and 7 on the 1080 Ti, on the ICX GTX 1080, or FETs 1 and 5 on the GTX 1080 FE card, counting up. Page 2 describes the thermocouples used and talks calibration, chemical composition of adhesive pads, positioning, and more. If that’s of interest to you, check page 2. Taking this approach to cooler testing allows us to analyze a cooler’s efficacy for more than just the GPU because, as we explained in our EVGA ICX review, GPU thermals are only part of the story. The modern, lowered power budget of GPU silicon means that it’s not as challenging to keep a GPU cool as it used to be, and this leads to lower fan RPMs (controlled via PWM from the GPU), resulting in warmer FETs. We test the whole solution.

Let’s start with just the GTX 1080 Ti, then add other cards.

With our thermal torture test and with the GTX 1080 Ti in completely stock settings, including the fan and clock speeds, we’re seeing the GPU temperature sitting at its limit – right around 84-85C. This is the GTX 1080 Ti’s clock limit point, where the clock will start to ramp down in order to better sustain its thermal target. We’ll look at clock fluctuations in a moment.

For now, we can see GPU temperatures in the 84-85C range, with the MOSFETs number 7 and 2 closely packed around 65-68C. This is heavily competitive to AIB partner FET temperatures, but the card is also only under stock clock loads. The GPU temperature, of course, looks dismal when compared to AIB partners. The card requires a significantly higher fan speed in order to sustain a comparable GPU temperature to AIB models, which then sacrifices noise output in a substantial way. To this end, despite using high quality materials, the cooler is not all that great for our audience. It’s a better fit for system integrators or specific needs users, but for most folks, we’re still recommending axial or liquid coolers. This begins choking the clock in a way which is unnecessary, and means the FE cooler doesn’t allow the card to get the most out of the components. That’s where AIB vendors come in, of course.

Anyway, to round out, we have a PCB backplate temperature of around 60C. Completely fine. We only measure this to ensure that the backplate doesn’t unnecessarily trap high amounts of heat against the PCB, as we’ve seen before.

GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition vs. GTX 1080 Founders Edition Coolers

Here’s a comparison to the GTX 1080 FE, just for frame of reference to launching point for FE coolers. We’re seeing the GPU temperatures on each device locked to their max permissible limit when under stock settings, with the FET temperatures all within the same range. The GTX 1080 FE’s middle MOSFET does run about 1C warmer than the GTX 1080 Ti’s middle MOSFET, but the cards cool effectively identically when under a high stress workload. Also, this isn’t a perfect A/B comparison since we’re looking at a different VRM design and different FET placement, but gives a good look at hotspots.

What matters is the frequency throughput, of course, since they’re both boosting to a point of hitting thermal limits.

GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition Clock vs. Temperature (Clock Limiting)

Looking at the clock-rate versus the temperature, we can reveal that the GTX 1080 Ti sustains a higher, more stable clock when forcing its fan to 80%. No big surprise. This enters territory of unbearable noise and is not representative of a real-world user scenario, but does show how the silicon behaves when temperature is no longer a concern.

The GPU frequency on the GTX 1080 Ti with auto fan speeds, or around 50% (~25C ambient +/- 1C), shows that we’re bouncing rapidly between about 1341MHz to about 1544MHz. By contrast, the 1080 Ti at a manual 80% fan speed posts frequency almost at a constant 1480MHz, with occasional spikes to around 1544MHz. Note that this is with a VRM power virus scenario, so we’re seeing higher thermals despite a lower clock overall. These clocks are not representative of video games, where you’ll see higher boost states.

GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition vs. EVGA GTX 1080 ICX Thermals

The above chart shows an ICX card on the same table as the Ti FE card, just for frame of reference. The FET temperatures, as explained, are pretty damn good on nVidia’s design. It’s just the GPU that isn’t exactly agreeable, as we’ll highlight here:

GTX 1080 Ti FE Steady State Temperature

Just to stick one of our ancient charts back up here, here are the temperatures for the test when at steady state. The GTX 1080 Ti reference ends up around 58C delta T load for its steady state temperature when under torture workloads and with an auto fan, where the 1080 FE sits around 57.5C. That’s within our measurement variance, and so we must say that the 1080 Ti – alongside the 980 Ti – are effectively equal in thermal performance.

NVidia claimed 5C improvements with the 1080 Ti layout, but we can’t exactly validate that on the same PCB since we don’t have a means to fit both coolers on the same card. Changes in the FET layout and VRM design mean that we can’t do an apples-to-apples temperature comparison, but we can get fairly close.

If you’re curious about how an AIB partner board compares, our previous EVGA ICX review gives a good look at those numbers.

In general, though, you should expect the same high temperatures of all previous reference designs, and nVidia isn’t alone here – both major GPU vendors use radial fan designs. Using better cooling means quieter operation at higher frequencies, and unless you have a specific need for a reference board, we almost always recommend that you go with an AIB partner. Limitations can be removed from the native card by improving cooling, thus improving overall performance. Despite nVidia’s marketing presentation where CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed a 2038MHz maximum clock-rate at temperatures below 85C, we have not been able to replicate that in our testing environment. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but we want to highlight that 2038MHz is not generally sustainable other than in short bursts, and that <80C temperatures at 100% load are going to require louder fan RPMs than likely desirable.

If you do need a reference board for liquid blocks, consider waiting for the board vendors to ship their stripped down versions with disposable, plastic coolers. Those might be a bit cheaper at some point, considering usual rebates.

Continue to Page 4 for synthetics (FireStrike, TimeSpy). 

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