Hello all!
 
I recently got my FTW3 in and have been putting it through its paces with an aggressive fan curve just trying to see how I rolled in the silicon lottery and I had a question about the card's power usage: I have the bios successfully switched to slave (for 127% power limit) but I don't seem to ever breach 103%, holding mostly upper 90's or 100% instead. Is this normal or am I missing something that other people are doing to put their card closer to the 127% power limit?
 
I know Pascal can use up to 1.093v but I often find myself stabilizing at 1.081 instead. My fans are running pretty fast to keep the core 63C or below during benchmarks, and VRM/Memory temps are far below that, too. Any insights on how I can wring out the extra 12 millivolts?
 
Also what kind of Memory OC are people achieving with this card? I'm holding at just over 12Ghz but I've heard tale of people getting as high as 12.5! Did I just not luck out on the memory side?

bcavnaughWelcome to the Forum

Thank you! Great to be here :)

bcavnaughPost your Fire Strike Score Link like this /fs/9394581 *
 and for 3DMark /3dm11/9369410 *
You will be able to post real links after 10 or 11 Posts if I recall.

Oh I don't own 3DMark, can I post Unigine benches instead? I think I'm still waiting on my Superposition Advanced key from EVGA

It's funny because the card's already making a liar out of me haha - I just did a run of Superposition 1080p High and the card started 1.093v, first at 2074Mhz dropping to 2066Mhz for most of the run until the GPU got to about 64C then it dropped further  to 1.081v 2055Mhz. Is this some GPUBoost3 sorcery? Maybe I can afford to have the fans run even faster to keep the core under 64C to confirm...
Based on what I'm reading from other users, 2066-2050 puts the silicon at about mid-pack, right?
 
-edit-
Oh it culled the link post as you stated it would :P
 
-edit2-
Oh right, system info: Mobo is Asus Strix Z270E, CPU is 7700k doing 4.8 @ 1.29v (until I get my delidder shipped :P) and 16Gb TridentZ @ 3600 CL16, Bench running off a 960Evo. PSU is EVGA SuperNova 750W T2, and OS is Win10Pro
 
 

Oh also I forgot to note further about my card making a liar out of me: It was bouncing happily between 104% and 114% power usage which I guess confirms it's using the extra power budget, but not close to the 127% allotted. Is that normal behavior?

Hm upon further testing it looks like my card wants to boost to 2088 but drops to 2075 @ 44C, down to 2063 @ 56C, and further down to 2050 @ 67C
I'm not sure what happened but I can keep the voltage pinned to 1.093v now under load, it doesn't fluctuate at all.
Memory overclock turns out I can push it all the way to +725Mhz which results in 6237 x 2 = 12474Mhz
Results @ Unigine Superposition - 1080p High, like 18 places down.
 
So really it's just a temperamental GPUBoost 3.0 and a case that's not really optimized for air cooling. I love how it looks, though, so it's not worth returning for a few extra points on a benchmark.
 
I guess this means that while I lucked out a little bit on the silicon lottery, I definitely need to put this thing on water to get the most out of it. Honestly, I'm not willing to do it because I actually love the aesthetic of the air cooler o_o