As we have said in the past, and will do so again in the future, there is almost no good reason to manually overclock RTX 50-series video cards. The increase in temperatures, noise, stress on the card…. and reduction in safety factor for a bit more performance is rarely going to be worth it. One is better off simply going up a notch to a higher grade card than trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Put bluntly, NVIDIA has optimized its designs to the nth degree, and the days of massive “free” performance gains are long gone. Even more disturbing is the lack of fun modern cards have to offer overclocking. In the halcyon days, one could spend days or even weeks toying with an overclock.
Now?
Slide the power all the way to the right (in this cas,e from 360 to 400), throw the max allowable (yes, NVIDIA has even locked down RAM overclocking) 375Mhz increase on the RAM. Maybe spend a couple of minutes tweaking the fan profile… and that is it. No voyage of discovery. Certainly, no experience gained. All for a couple of extra Frames Per Second. Just. Not. Worth. It.
With all that negativity out of the way, the RTX 5080 16G Expert OC is a fairly fun (by modern standards) card to overclock. Quite honestly, that Flow FROZR 2-based cooling solution is a beast. Such a beast that, unlike the majority of 2-fan models, the increase in noise is hardly noticeable. Sure, you can make it buzzsaw loud, but it doesn’t have to be in order to keep noise levels in check. Even when dealing with an extra 40watts of heat (plus the hotter running RAM ICs), it just doesn’t care all that much. As such, it may not be all that impressive by historic (overclocking) standards… but compared to what is available today? Well, that is a horse of a different color altogether. This card is so far beyond ‘average’ that we would not judge against F.E. or even the ProArts of the market. Instead, we would say that this is a card that will get you darn close to SUPRIM levels of overclocking fun, but do so at darn near Founder’s Edition asking price. No matter how you slice it, that is impressive.
