A question about real world performance, benchmarks and RTX5080 memory overclocking

[u/DesignflawEU]

Hi everyone, new to the sub & new to GPU overclocking, but not new to PC building in general.

Relevant specs of my system:

Motherboard: Gigabyte B850 Aorus Stealth (ATX)
CPU: 9800x3d watercooled via Hydroshift II
GPU: Gigabyte RTX5080 Gaming OC
RAM: KLEVV Cras V 32Gb 6000mhz CL30
PSU: LianLi 1000W Edge Gold

TL:DR: My MSI afterburner settings are +3000 memory, +350core, 100% power limit and 100% core voltage. My benchmark scores are hundreds of points higher than if I had the same settings otherwise and had a memory OC of +2500 or 2000. Steel Nomad (99% stability), Speed Way (99.5% stability), OCCT VRAM 1 Hour and OCCT 3D Adaptive 1 Hour stress tests all passed without errors. Temps are stable, hotspot is 75-80ish max and delta to GPU is 10-15C at any given moment.

Is it true the memory OC is stable and there's no ECC related "bottleneck" happening despite people claiming the RTX5080 can only be stable for everyday use at +2000ish memory OC? Am I doing something wrong or did I get lucky with a good GPU?

Long version:

I just recently finished a build and after updating all drivers and the BIOS, I wanted to dabble in overclocking. After reaching a stable UV + CO setup for my CPU I moved on to dabble in 3D mark and MSI Afterburner.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfD8I8yFts&feature=youtu.be - This is the video guide I followed to find my optimal setup for the GPU overclock. I made sure to record all scores every time I adjusted a slider, starting with core clock before moving onto memory clock. My best results came at 125% power limit, 100% core voltage, +350 core and +3000 memory.

After finding the absolute best performance that didn't crash or artifact in the benchmarks (Steel Nomad & Speed Way) I started adjusting the power limit down towards 100% in increments of 5%. I found that at 100% power limit (360W real world draw measured) and +3000 memory +350 Core I still got within 250 points of my all time best score.

I decided to test the stability of this profile and ran Steel Nomad stress test (pass 99% stability score), Speed Way stress test (pass 99.5% stability score), OCCT VRAM for 1 hour (95% of VRAM loaded, no errors recorded) and OCCT 3D Adaptive 10-100% up every 5 seconds by 5%, no errors recorded.

After reading online and people saying that the the RTX5080 typically can only be stable memory OC of +2000 ish and that ECC will actually hide the errors, I'm left wondering if I actually dialed in a real world performance upgrade or something that isn't really stable and is actually hiding behind the ECC "bottleneck"?

I'd be happy to hear from someone more experienced about their thoughts on the methodology and what I might have missed/done wrong/should do.

[u/BedroomThink3121]

There is only one answer when it comes to overclocking:

"Every chip is unique and will behave differently"

And no this is not true that only 2000ish memory is stable for 5080 and nothing more.

I have an OC profile with +280 core and +3000 memory with 110% PL, it's been stable for over an year.

The thing with power limit is, the more power available to your card, the less it's likely to crash that's why it's suggested to just max out the power slider.

But if you want lower power consumption, that is when undervolting is suggested. So that power slider can stay at max for the microsecond moments qhen your GPU needs that power but the average power consumption would be a lot lesser.

[u/DesignflawEU → u/BedroomThink3121]

So one could reason that having passed the named tests - all of them on this OC profile with no heat/wattage problems, no crashes or artifacts and no errors recorded by OCCT - the profile is stable and there is no ECC bottleneck happening?

[u/Additional_Area5002 → u/DesignflawEU]

The only config ive personally seen mem clock issues was +3000 at a .925 undervolt, in Warframe. I noticed a few assets had a blocky weird glitch looking texture instead of whatever they were supposed to have. A dozen+ hours of helldivers 2 never saw anything like that happen.

My personal experience is there's 2 maybe 3 different levels of "validated". 1) "this will pass a benchmark but will fall over in actual gaming". 2) "this will pass a benchmark and stability tests. Imo this is the sanity check before actually getting your hopes up for being a good daily driver. 3) "this passed multiple benchmarks + real world use in more than one game for at least several hours and is a good daily driver candidate.

I know it's a meme to brag about high benchmark scores but just to prove a point the best possible score I could ever pull in steel nomad with a 5080 was like 10335 or something but that wasn't stable.

For actual comfy use more like 10100 give or take.

But we're talking the equivalent of 103fps vs 101fps.

Even if your daily driver is only in the 9900is and alot of people are in that range, we're talking a difference of what. 5fps? Not something you'd ever notice in real use.

[u/BedroomThink3121 → u/DesignflawEU]

ECC bottleneck is such a pain in the ass because it'll need a lot of testing and there is no method to just tell if its happening or not.

Basically you'll have yo try memory clocks from 0 to +3000 with a gap as small as possible ideally 1, but that's imposter as it'll be 3000 runs. But you can try doing it with an increament of 50, that way it'll be still 60 runs but you'll know near exact where you're having ECC bottleneck and what is the best spot.

[u/Noreng → u/BedroomThink3121]

Just do a binary search between +1000 and +3000, and you've cut the number of iterations from 3000 down to 11

[u/lancelane7]

try mvolt+ to use the same settings plus test xbar and sys offsets. Should be able to do 350-550 but YMMV.

[u/Noxious89123]

Is it true the memory OC is stable and there's no ECC related "bottleneck" happening despite people claiming the RTX5080 can only be stable for everyday use at +2000ish memory OC? Am I doing something wrong or did I get lucky with a good GPU?

Consider that all RTX5080's at stock clocks, are only running the memory at 30Gbps.

Then also consider, that all RTX5080's at launch were fitted with SAMSUNG K4VAF325ZC-SC32 GDDR7 memory ICs, which are specified by Samsung to run at 32Gbps.

So +1000MHz memory offset in a tool like MSI Afterburner just gets the memory to its actual stock speed!

Ofcourse, we do have to factor in that that is still an overclock for the memory controller, etc.

[u/EtotheA85]

Silicon lottery, there is no universal rule what is stable.
However, the only, and I repeat the only way you can see if its truly stable, is by playing games. No benchmark is going to tell you if its 100% stable, not even if you run OCCT for 10 days straight.
My tip is, try out all the games you play and play them for at least a few hours each, if it doesn't crash in any of them then you have what is a somewhat stable OC, emphasis on somewhat.
Eventually though, you'll find out which games in your library that has the lowest threshold which will show signs of instability earlier than other titles, it can be a specific location or scene in a specific game, another thing to note is that the most demanding games doesn't necessarily crash before other less demanding games (As an example, one of the games in my library that crashes pretty early on, specially at specific locations is RDR2, even though I have way more demanding games.)
Memory clock can be more tricky, as you can have a unstable memory OC without really seeing it, signs of instability can be uneven frametimes, slight stuttering, and such.
So you really want to do one at a time, I'd recommend first you find your stable core OC, then after a week or two move onto memory OC.

[u/Additional_Area5002]

+3000 memory being stable or not will depend on your voltage and silicon lottery. At a .925 undervolt in helldivers 2 I never noticed any issues but there were signs of memory clock issues in Warframe. At .965 3055mhz which I think is about my current sweet spot I don't see any issues at +3000 mem clock.

[u/DivideFluffy1279]

Testmem vulkan is your friend

[u/Truth_Teller28585]

Do what others have said and get mvolt and crank the X-bar to something like +450 to start. Should see a nice performance boost.