My First Rig Build 1080 Ti GPUs

Code is maximum 80% load continuous. Anything over that and you are SOL if something happens. Insurance will F you if your pulling 90% load on a 20 amp line. Also, the breaker is not meant to protect your rig, it’s sole purpose is to protect the 12 guage wire in the wall from starting a fire, it could care less if your rig is on fire as long as it’s not drawing more than 20 amps.

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I didn’t realize I had power insurance lol… The rigs aren’t on fire. They have never been on fire. They will never be on fire. It’s all good.

Not true. overclocking does draw more power. See image attached, and note the Power level, then look at the default clock and the current clock speeds. the card’s ‘default’ power draw at 100% TDP is 250w (see second attached)… overclocked to 2ghz it draws 300w.

The riser CARD might not need power, but the riser does PULL power… don’t believe me, try unplugging the external power source from your riser. See if that card still runs… hint: it won’t. That’s because the card draws part of its power from the riser. A max of 75w, but because of, as you say, external PCIe power support, it is in the neighborhood of 25-50w average depending on the card. I KNOW this to be true, because GTX 1070s use 150w of power and only connect via a single 6 pin PCIe cable which has a maximum power throughput of 75w, so the other 75w must be coming from the riser’s power source, either direct from the PSU, or through the motherboard if it’s plugged into the mobo socket. Either way, that power comes from the PSU in some form or another… so it’s part of the overall power load of a system. (Maximum Power Consumption of Graphics Card Connectors | Geeks3D)

I didn’t intend to do a lecture on power consumption, my overall point was, don’t burn your house down because you’re drawing too much power over a line and it melts the insulation off of the wires inside your wall.

Are you running the xtreme Verizon of the aorus 1080ti?

Yes - I’m very happy with the performance and the overclocking is in the top 3 cards on the market. It might be the best overclocker, though there are things I’m not crazy about like the 2.5 pcie slots it takes up, but so does the Strix model. I’ve got a couple of EVGA FTW3 on the way that only take up 2 pcie slots. I’m very interested to see how it compares to the aorus in cooling given that it has async fans.

Tenacious,

Could you share a bit more about your observations concerning the Aorus vs. Strix (and then when you get the EVGA FTW3)? I have the EVGA FTW3 and like it, just got an Aorus yesterday. I’ve been meaning to ask what people are getting from these cards.

Thanks.

Aorus non Xtreme gives me around 750 sol/s with OC, doesn’t go over 62 C, in case it helps

Thanks. I find the EVGA FTW3 will do 720~740+ with -10/-15 & -250/-300. Power draw tends to be 208 - 220w, something like that. And that is in a rig with other cards, not solo. Temps stay under 60c, but that’s with external fans as well, good ventilation, and a cool room.

Also, I see the bump up of about 20 Sol/s when running XMR-Stak for CPU mining Monero at the same time (BlackHawk first mentioned this). I set XMR-Stak to use about 75% of available threads.

Cute. If your rigs are in your home, then you have homeowners insurance, if at your business, then Buisness insurance. Niether will cover a problem caused by intentionally overloading of a circuit (ignorance or not). In the unfortunate event of a fire, the investigator will determine the loads. Good luck to you and I hope things stay stable.

It’s not possible to have three 1080 8 GPU rigs on one 20 amp 110V line. One rig is over 90% load for 20amps.

He has them on separate circuits.

You can get the Delta 2,400w server PSU. Problem though, as you mention, unless you have 220v circuit handy, you will need a step up transformer. And those don’t behave so well if you draw close to their rated output (Amazon reviews of the ELC transformer are informative, check the negative reviews).

I like a mix of 1070 and 1080 Ti’s in a rig. 1070s draw around 135w, 1080 Ti’s if underclocked will draw < 250w per card. I don’t think 8 x 1080 Ti’s one a single rig, in a residence with normal 20A or 15A 110v outlets is a good idea. Plus, if that’s in a frame setup, it’s getting a bit heavy if you have to lift and move it around.

I don’t have a Strix to do a direct comparison, but you can check out the detailed review at Gamers Nexus on youtube… they do a total breakdown of the entire 1080 ti series, basically comparing temps and noise because the rest are limited by pascal architecture.

The features of strix differ from aorus somewhat, but the size is about the same, 2.5 pcie slots for both (MASSIVE heatsinks) and both perform comparably to one another in benchmark tests for gaming so overclocking and heat / noise reduction are the key variances (other than RGB toy features)

I run my aorus overclocked to hell and back, it draws 300w at 2ghz core 12ghz memory, and hashrates for equihash are about 770-790 sol/s consistently. Some will say it’s more efficient to run at lower power settings, and that may be trued for a sol/watt comparison. But power is cheap here ($.0925 / kwh) so the difference in cost for power is negligible and the hash increase is substantial enough to be worth it in my opinion - roughly 5-6% for a cost of 50 extra watts an hour. At 250w (100% TDP) that’s a daily power cost of $0.55 and at 300w it’s $0.74. I more than make up for that added expense by pushing a higher hashrate. The Aorus also has a 4 year warranty, which is the best I’ve seen, and makes it a good value at $750-$775 retail.

As for heat, the card is well within acceptable limits. at 133% power (300w) it runs between 76-79c in a closed case with fans running fairly silent for the amount of load. If I run at 100-125% TDP heat drops down to about 72c (max draw possible is 150% but I find that at 133% with highest stable clock speed I am no longer hitting a power limit when mining, which I DO hit at 125% of TDP, so 150% is wasteful). At full load 133% TDP 2ghz/12ghz overclock settings I keep the fans running at 70-75% which is still really quiet - most of my case noise comes from the case fans rather than the GPU.

Here are links to the Gamers Nexus breakdown on thermal/noise differences between the Strix model and other cards…

and Aorus 1080 Ti Xtreme:

They also review the FTW3 if you want to take a look at that too.

Let me know if there are any other questions about it… i’m happy to answer them if i can.

EDIT: out of curiosity I wanted to see what the temp would go down to with higher fan speeds…
@ 100% fan speed, 2ghz/12ghz clocks at full load mining, the temp drops to 69c, but increases noise a bit, though it’s not so loud as to be distracting.
@ 85% fan speed, same settings and load, noise drops substantially and temp sits at 74c after a few minutes at that fan speed - well within reasonable temps for a 300w power draw at full load.

Thanks for information and the links, very much appreciated. Wish I had your electricity rates, but mine are substantially more expensive.

Ditto. SF Bay Area here: $0.24/kWh on EV1 rate. I run my 1080ti cards at 175W, GTX 1070s at 115W, and GTX 1060s at 80W. Doesn’t make any sense to go higher.

Wow that’s steep… i lived in San Francisco for a few years, but never thought about power costs much. California has always had really high taxes on everything though, so it shouldn’t surprise me I guess.

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What is the max OC you were able to get? It seems like everyone, including myself, have had trouble having a stable OC with these cards.

The reason I think a lot of people are having problems is they’re trying to overclock it using traditional clock alterations, which does not work well, if at all, on this card. The reason is that Aorus has binned these cards and pegged their max boost at the limit of what the chip can do already, so overclocking by more than +25 mhz core will cause it to crash. The memory is another story, I’ve been running stable 12ghz memory forever. It will go up to 12.7ghz, but after that it will cause instability.

The method I use for overclocking is to use the Aorus app, and raise the power level. If you watch in nvidia inspector how the power relates to the clock settings, you’ll notice that the memory stays consistent, but as you raise the power limit to 125% or higher, the core clock raises up to around 2012mhz. I run my card at 133% power limit, and the core clock when mining sits at around 2ghz all the time at 100% load. Then you can play around with the memory clock to see how much more hash performance you get from higher clock offsets until you reach a sweet spot. For me, that’s at about 11.5ghz to 11.7ghz memory clock. When gaming you can go up much higher, but for mining it doesn’t really help to go to a higher clock speed than that, and just costs more in power.

So my custom settings are +30 clock, +700 memory, +0 voltage, 80% fan, +133 power limit which SAYS the clock is at 1751, but if you view in nvidia inspector you’ll see the actual clock speed under load is ~2ghz. That is why people fail at overclocking I think, because they don’t realize that the card itself overclocks automatically under load, and they try to jack up the GPU core clock speed like they would on a standard GPU, and it basically boosts the core up way over 2ghz when under load, crashing the system.

If you wanted to play around with voltage, you might get some higher clocks, but I haven’t found the need for that since it’s already performing at such high levels.

Oh okay thank! Yea I have +40 on the core and +400 on the mem. I’ll try the +1000 on the mem. I’ve been using afterburner but if it doesn’t work on that then I’ll use the aorus oc software. I’ll let you know what I get

Aorus software is better for Aorus cards in this case… MSI is great for most cards, but here I find it doesn’t read the stats properly or overclock correctly.

True. I have gotten to 790-800 sol/s but then it crashed. I am probably just going to keep it at 770. It cycles from 750-780 so I think that is fine.