While we wait for the presentation and launch of the new generation of NVIDIA graphics cards and the Ti model of the current top of the range, the most powerful RTX 30 continues to look down on the rest of its generation. However, if you don’t have enough performance you may have considered overclocking your RTX 3090. What is the maximum clock speed we can achieve with it?
We have to take into account a series of elements that affect the increase in the clock speed of any piece of hardware. The first of these has to do with energy consumption. Which in this graphics card is designed to take a power of 350 W from the power supply, so we can never exceed that value of consumption for the clock speed of what the GPU of it.
Temperature and cooling are key for a graphics card of this type
Moreover, it will reach the point where the temperature will be so high that the heat generated will not only affect the huge chip in the middle, but also the GDDR6X chips, which by thermal drowning will end up lowering their clock speed and with it the bandwidth. band. The same situation, but in reverse. It can also happen, since if we put the GDDR6X at a high speed, its temperature can affect the graphics chip. So the solution is in equilibrium.
This leads us to the second point, which is refrigeration, and this is important to highlight. At standard speeds, what are the ones NVIDIA gives, all of its custom models work perfectly when it comes to expelling the heat accumulated at those speeds, but when we get closer to certain limits there are models that better withstand speed increases than not others. So we cannot directly and objectively say what the maximum speed of your specific RTX 3090 is.
What clock speed can an RTX 3090 achieve via overclock?
Let’s see what we can get from an NVIDIA RTX 3090 in its standard model, that is, the one that NVIDIA has sold directly and what is one of the rarest pieces to find right now and at the same time one of the most coveted due to its incredible technical specifications and performance even almost two years after being released. So far no other has beaten it in raw performance and only its Ti variant and next-gen models will.
The maximum speed that the RTX 3090 can reach is 2 GHz in a stable way. From that point on, each small increase in speed will be a considerable increase in the voltage and with it its energy consumption. That is, we will approach the point where the TDP shoots up enormously and with it the temperature generated. That is why we will need our graphics card to have a good liquid cooling system included with the card. Which will obviously make the unit have a significant additional price premium.
