sethleigh

CraptacularOne2 things, this thread is from December of last year and second, this thread was about RTX 3080s, not 3090s.

Two things: the guy you replied to was the 4th one to reply to this necro-rezzed thread, not the one who rezzed it. Second, since a previous poster had suggested adding a 3090 to the OP's machine in response to OP's possibly rhetorical question asking for tips, there is an articulable nexus to the contents of the thread to the 3090.

Since the 3080 series is still current generation, I'm not sure necro-rezzing this thread was necessarily a bad thing. I haven't got a 3080 score to add to this, but if anyone is interested in comparing the 3080 scores with a 3080ti score, here's my best, taken right after I'd installed the Optimus water block and was taking the card out for a spin. It was good for #11 on the day I ran it of scores achieved with a Ryzen 5900x cpu and 3080ti gpu.

sethleigh

Nereus
 
Damn, that's impressive with a 3080Ti, your CPU also helped with that great overall score. I have not cracked 20k with my 3090. 19,883.

Thanks! Yeah, I compared that score to a few others in the same vicinity on the ranking and most of them had slightly better GPU scores than mine, and it was my CPU score that helped carry it quite that high. My 5900x is pushed fairly aggressively using AMD's built-in OCing tools (PBO2/Curve Optimizer), and my RAM profile is all hand-tuned timings that are about as fast as 3800MT/s RAM can go.
 
I'm going to guess that your 3090 is air cooled from the fact that your GPU hit a max speed of 2175MHz (faster than my max 2160MHz for that run) but only maintained an average of 2003MHz vs. my average of 2105MHz. Your 3090 is probably crossing the thermal throttling temperature threshold for parts of the benchmark and slowing down, whereas my water-cooled 3080ti never crosses that threshold so whatever GPU speed it attains in response to the particular load demanded by the benchmark it's able to maintain. It makes a difference in benchmark scores if you care about it, but it's going to be a hard sell arguing that you actually need better during games. If this matters: my system with the 3080ti is vastly quieter than it was during the couple months I ran the 3080ti on air while waiting for Optimus to ship me the water block. The cooling load for the GPU that used those three dinky fans on the 3080ti turning at thousands of RPM was transferred to the three 140mm and two 180mm fans on my radiators turning probably not even 1000 RPM, and that makes a colossal difference.

sethleigh

Nereus
Nope.. water cooled; full CPU/GPU loop with 2x360mm radiators, although at the time I ran those tests it might have been 2x240mm, can't remember for sure. EK GPU block, Optimus CPU block. I don't think the GPU temp went over 60C. There seems to be a number of different things that cause these cards to throttle though, not just temp. Possibly throttled based on power? I should try dropping the power target and voltage rather than just putting them all on max. Bit of a juggling act getting everything just right. The GPU memory refuses to go any higher than +1000, so that may have something to do with it.
 
The CPU runs stable under load with 5.3GHz on all cores, so it seems to be a decent chip fortunately. Won't do 5.4 stable though, even on just a couple of cores, which is a bit of a head scratcher.

My guess is going to be thermal throttling of the GPU then. Your CPU cores are hitting higher clockspeeds than mine, but there are 4 fewer of them, so it's no surprise my CPU score is much better. That your graphics score is down ~1k from mine, though, with a 3090 vs 3080ti, is sort of surprising. With your average GPU temp of 51 C I'd bet you are seeing times during the runs where the GPU temp has crossed the threshold for thermal throttling. With my average GPU temp of 36 C during those runs it's insanely unlikely that I ever saw thermal throttling at any point.
 
It's also possible I'm seeing lower water temps due to having more radiator surface area. I've got a single 140mm, a 280x140mm, and a 360x180mm radiator. The Torrent case will support this 180mm wide rad up front, which is actually why I bought the Torrent in the first place (I happened to have a 360x180mm rad). This adds up to around three full 360x120mm rads' worth of surface area.