Hello, I've been having some instability with my new 3080 12gb and have found something strange:

The EVGA specs call for a boost clock of 1800MHz on this card, however under load I am seeing up to 2000MHz in monitoring software. I suspect this is the cause of the instability. I have not overclocked the card manually but am able to underclock it to normal speeds in Precision X1 software.

Furthermore if I enable debug mode in Nvidia control panel the card locks the boost clock at these high speeds under load. (1995 MHZ).

Anyone have an idea of what is going on? What could be causing it to run at these higher boost clocks?

Is this the probable cause of the instability? Can it be fixed?

Interesting, so I guess 2000MHz boost clock on this card is normal. I'll look for other solutions then. Thanks.

Crashing in DCS world flight simulator, which is the primary use I bought the card for. The crashes started after upgrading from an 1070. I've been unable to find a specific cause but the crash log suggest it is GPU related.

However DCS is somewhat crash prone so it may not be the cards fault. I've been unable to replicate the problem in stress tests or other games.

Out of curiosity, what regulates the boost clock? I figured 1800MHz would be the hard limit, is there no hard limit then? Does it always just run as fast as it can then?

AliP
The crashes started after upgrading from an 1070. I've been unable to find a specific cause but the crash log suggest it is GPU related.

Jump from GTX 1070 to RTX 3080 is pretty segnificant in terms of power supply. What's you PSU and how it's connected to a card (which cables)?
 

AliP
Out of curiosity, what regulates the boost clock? I figured 1800MHz would be the hard limit, is there no hard limit then? Does it always just run as fast as it can then?

NVIDIA GPU have so called "GPU Boost" technology when GPU rise it's frequency depends of few factors: temperature of GPU (lower is better) and i think there also power (temp may be low, it's rise frequency, but it's rise power draw from PSU and if PSU can't give it - it stay where is may get). So, in you game you can do test run with power monitoring via software (like HWiNFO for example) how high GPU power draw go. I think GPU-Z also may show you reason (Sensors tab and then PerfCap reason sensor).

When you upgraded, did you happen to do a DDU on your drivers to make sure you didn't run into any driver-bugs from upgrading hardware? It isn't always required, but usually a good idea, especially if you're not interested in doing a completely fresh Windows install. At minimum, it's good to do a "clean install" (the check box during install of the Nvidia drivers) when you're changing hardware.
 
Also, you'll want to make sure Precision X1 is closed when you're updating your drivers. That has caused some issues for folks previously. 

It looks like resetting my motherboard bios to default settings has solved the problem. 

loveha
Did you set your ram back to XMP?
Was XMP set before?
Was there a manual CPU overclock?
CPU cooler?
Case?
Mobo and CPU?
PSU and age.

Resetting to defaults changed a whole bunch of settings to auto, it will be hard to pin whatever was responsible down.

I had XMP set but it is now auto and I believe the ram is actually underclocked now.

The CPU was not overclocked but I may have followed some bios setup guide when I originally set up the system years ago. My guess is one of those settings was causing CPU/RAM instability and it is just being discovered now that the system is bottlenecked by CPU/RAM speed rather than the GPU.

I have some full tower case and a good CPU air cooler. Temps are not an issue.

Mobo ASUS Prime Z390-A, CPU i5-9600k, PSU Corsair rm1000x.

loveha
Well, what I would do now is set ram back to XMP. See how that does for a week. If nothing happens, then we know it's not a ram issue.

I actually have two different types of Corsair Vengence RAM installed:
2x 8gb 3200MHz 16-18-18-36
2x 8gb 3000MHz 15-17-17-35

The BIOS XMP profile that is available is for the 3000MHz version, since the timings are different, do you think it will run the 3000MHz XMP profile fine? Do I need to figure out and set manually the lesser of all the timings and speed?

loveha
3000MHz is the slower of the two kits, so theoretically it should be fine.

Probably, but the timings are a bit tighter. Not dramatically so...it could be ok...but if one of the kits isn't getting enough voltage or something it could lead to some instability. Or if the looser-timing memory just really can't hack it at the slightly tighter specs when under load.
 
It can sometimes be quite difficult to get mismatched memory to play nicely together.