It’s all over except some more cable management… And a whole lot of tweaking.
Absolute unit.
I know they said the 3080 was a big card, especially the AIB models, but wow, this Amp Holo takes it to another level. This thing weighs a ton! Overall it’s a fairly attractive looking card. The solid backplate lends itself to a slightly lower thermal performance than other AIBs, but I’m that’s mostly down to the stock fan curve which is fairly quiet.
Current curve.
The RTX 3080 takes very well to “undervolting” and can tend to maintain great clock speeds at much lower voltages. I’ve decided to do a stepped curve as per what I’ve found on Hardforums, and then set my power limit to 90%. With this I’m pulling about 300w vs 350 at stock, performing about the same as stock, and producing less heat.
The current fan curve.
My current fan curve is fairly aggressive. In my current testing, playing older titles (Mass Effect Andromeda, Borderland: The Pre-Sequel) I’m seeing temps under 60 degrees, and for more demanding titles (My only RTX title currently is Call of Duty Modern Warfare) see 4K gameplay at max settings hit 71c max. Oh, and that’s pinned at 60FPS. Not bad! Noise isn’t a massive concern as I play games with headphones, and otherwise while doing normal tasks the system is close to quiet - I definitely have fan speeds up a bit more than previously, but we’re looking at much higher TDP parts now.
1660 Super for context.
I feel like I can go lower on voltages with a bit more testing, but I really just want to play some games again. I’m pretty happy with the settings as is, and with a bit more time playing with ideal fan curves for the case, I think I can bring my temps down a bit further. This cannot be treated like the previous cards where I can keep my case fans at around 300-600RPM. I have some plans to raise the case off the carpeted floor using a plank or something but I haven’t got around to it yet. With that, an additional 140mm intake or two at the bottom could add more airflow to a very hot card and ideally let me drop fan speed a bit more. I’d also be able to flip the power supply again, isolating it from the rest of the system. Sometime in the near future I suppose.
That’s a lot of NAND.
Finally, taking the place of my 6TB external drive is this 4TB Western Digital Blue SSD. It’s a TLC drive that can saturate SATA3, which makes it considerably faster than the 160mbps I was getting off the external. The big two boosts here though come from both the lack of noise and the responsiveness of an SSD. The external was loud and slow. It’s fine for dealing with movies and stuff, but my Lightroom Classic library is on the drive, and that makes a huge difference. Just firing that up after migrating my data was astounding the difference in performance. NAND only baby, here we go.
So I suppose that’s almost it for desktop upgrade. It’s been a while, and I hope it’ll be another while before we do it again. I’ll be posting more photos once the U4919DW arrives, and on top of that, expect photos once I’ve re-cabled the desktop.