Nvidia’s RTX 4080 is now the focus of overclocking geeks, with the GPU reaching sky-high clock speeds (after seeing the huge overclocks the RTX 4090 already achieved, as you may remember).
tom devices (Opens in a new tab) The Galax OC team spotted using the company’s RTX 4080 SG 1-Click OC graphics card (SG stands for ‘Serious Gamer’), and managed to bump it up to 3,615GHz for a new record as the fastest 4080 we’ve seen.
That’s over 1GHz higher than the SG’s factory default boost, which is 2.565GHz by the way, with a one-click overclocking mode, the graphics card is named after getting up to 2.58GHz to give you an idea of a slight more typical overclock.
Another new record has been unlocked! The OC Team has managed to push the clock speed of the GeForce RTX™ 4080 16GB SG 1-Click OC up to 3615MHz, surpassing the original OC One-Click button clock by 40% ⚡! #GALAX #PC #GeForceRTX4080SG #GeForceRTX40series #Overclocking pic.twitter.com/8IVBNG4d9hNovember 29, 2022
As Galax notes, the 3,615GHz overclock is actually 40% faster than the single-click overclock, which is an impressive feat.
Sadly, no other overclocking information is shared, although we can safely assume that it used liquid nitrogen cooling (or some other exotic method), since those kinds of speeds can’t be reached with any conventional cooler.
Analysis: A very impressive feat, but one unlikely to move consumers
The RTX 4080 launched to rave reviews from reviewers and gamers alike, due to its shaky overall value proposition — Nvidia certainly pushed the price as high as it could with this GPU. The truth is that with the RTX 4080’s price point, in some cases dedicated third-party boards cost nearly as much as the RTX 4090 – which is a much faster graphics card (which is certainly an absurd case).
Given that, you may not want to hear about the RTX 4080 hitting record speeds, or care much about it at all, and we get where you’re coming from. But it’s still interesting to see how far these Lovelace GPUs can be pushed when overclocked, with plenty of headroom available.
The RTX 4090 previously had a boost speed of 3,825GHz, but remember this was the ‘HOF’ (Hall Of Fame) version of the Galax 4090, a board specifically designed to work well with overclocking (an expensive limited edition proposition for overclocking experts mainly operating frequency).
The RTX 4080 used here is just a simple Galax board aimed at consumers, so seeing it hit just 200MHz off a seriously dedicated HOF version of the 4090 is really impressive. It does suggest that the GPU has some thick chops for overclocking, but it’s unlikely to convince potential RTX 4080 buyers to take the plunge, instead we think the lower price might help do the trick there.
If Galax makes a HOF version of the RTX 4080, it’ll obviously be able to do a good deal faster, but if that happens, who knows? While the HOF variants of the RTX 3080 and 2080 (Super) have been produced by Galax, given the situation with the 4080 and its current popularity – or lack thereof – we don’t expect anyone to come up with anything like it in the near future, let’s just lay it out from here.
The best recent news we’ve heard about the RTX 4080, honestly, is the way it’s teaching graphics card brokers a well-deserved lesson.
