EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING Review: Dialing-In On Performance

Name: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING
Brand: EVGA

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 11, 2017, 12:00 PM EDT

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 - Overclocking, Power, And Noise

Page 7: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 - Overclocking, Power, And Noise

We also spent a little time overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2, to see what kind of additional performance it might have available under its hood. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed 1080 Ti cards could achieve roughly 2GHz GPU clocks with a little tweaking when he first unveiled the card. Our Founder's Edition sample JUST missed the mark, topping out at 1,999MHz in our initial review. EVGA's card is a different animal, however, as you will see...

To overclock the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 we altered the frequency offset and power / temperature targets until our test system was no longer stable. First we cranked up the power target to 120% and also kicked up the temperature target to 90 degrees. Then we bumped up the GPU and memory clocks until we had instability or saw visual anomalies on-screen.

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 Overclock Details

Ultimately, we saw a peak GPU clock of 2,025MHz with a 5,562MHz memory clock (effective speed 11.2Gbps). Considering how fast the memory is clocked on the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING by default, and that the GP102 GPU is a much larger, more complex chip, that requires more power than the smaller GP104 used on standard GeForce GTX 1080 cards, these results are impressive.

While we had the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some moderate improvements in performance in the games / settings we tested. Both VR Score and Hitman showed increases in performance of about 7% and pushed the EVGA card to the head of the pack.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Due to its higher core and memory clocks, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 consumed somewhat more power than the Founder's Edition card, but the Gigabyte card -- which is clocked slightly higher -- ultimately consumed the most power under load.

We should also mention that temperatures on the card are a non-issue. At idle, the card's GPU hovered in the lower-30 degree range. And under sustained load the GPU temperature never actually hit the default target. Even while overclocked the GPU peaked at under 70ºC, which is both impressive and reassuring.

Noise isn't a concern either. At idle, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 is essentially silent, because the fans either spin down completely (depending on the temperature) or spin very slowly. Under load, with the default fan curve, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 is slightly louder than the Founder's Edition or Gigabyte card, but we'd still consider it quiet.