 I just want to be like, hey guys! And then, just, okay bye! That's all I really want out of this. So the RTX 2080 turned out to be kind of a dud in terms of performance per dollar, at least until RTX actually happens. But what Nvidia did manage to bring us with the RTX launch is the 2080 Ti. Now it might be the most expensive consumer graphics card ever, but it's also the most powerful consumer graphics card ever, almost as fast as the Titan V. So, if you're anything like me, you've probably been asking yourself, well, how far can it go? Well, we could just take days and Steve's words for it, but that wouldn't be any fun, would it? This video is brought to you by Mac Weldon. Mac Weldon wants you to be more comfortable, and that's why they've got their try-on guarantee. If you don't love your first pair of underwear, you can keep it and get a full refund. So use offer code TechTips to get 20% off at the link below. First order of business is setting up our test bench with the fastest stock card that we have on hand. The MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio. Now, this thing isn't especially amazing. Most boards right now are actually closely based on Nvidia's reference design, but it's got a 100 MHz boost clock advantage out of the box, which is better than a kick in the shorts. Now there are a few ways to overclock Nvidia's Turing cards, and we're going to start with the simplest, the new OC scanner. So it's this little button right here, and what this promises to do is automagically get you the best clocks possible on your card. So it's doing basically what you would do in normal overclocking. It's loading the GPU, it's gradually increasing the frequency, and then it's checking for stability. We're up to 1500 MHz so far. This is actually pretty cool. Scan succeeded average overclock is 154 MHz. One thing I'd like to add though is that even if OC scanner does a great job of your core clocks, you're definitely going to want to adjust your power target, and you're going to want to adjust your memory clock separately. Because having a look at our overclocking results here, we saw that with an 8% increase in frequency over stock, we only beat our out of the box results by about 4%, and then with memory thrown in, we were actually pleasantly surprised. As it turns out, tuning memory on Turing is as important as tuning the core. But I am not happy with our results, however pleasing they might be, yet. While we were tweaking our OC for stability, we hit our first roadblock, Turing's non-adjustable core voltage. Thankfully, there's good news. Thanks to our buddies, Derp Bauer, Steve from Gamers Nexus, and Jay's Two Cents, we know that with a certain mod to the card, we can actually increase the voltage, and that in spite of the 2080 series' excellent thermals in our original review, once we're overclocking, cooling is going to be the major limiting factor. And that, come on screws, come off. Ha ha. That is where that noise you guys have been able to hear in the background all this time comes in. We have brought out not one, but both of the chillers. So Anthony, let's do this thing. So, the mod's pretty simple, right? Yeah, so we need to take the back plate off. Okay, we need a screwdriver kit. So do we only need to remove the back? We need to remove both. So basically the card needs to be naked. MSI apparently is using the back plate to actually cool. So like there's heat pads and stuff back there. That's what they say. Yeah, we've heard that story before. Okay, so I'm pretty sure what we're looking at is these guys here. So these are on the input on each of those. All three? Yes, but it's possible that if we do all three, then the card will think that there's an error, and lock itself to the lowest power state. So probably what we want to do is do one of the eight and one of the six and see what happens. We can try all three. Up to you. What do you mean probably? I thought you knew what you were doing. This is the first time I've done it. Yeah, this is the resistor. These here, I'm not quite sure what those are. So we'll shunt these two. Fake connector. What the card does is it knows that this is 12 volts coming in, and it also knows the value of each of these resistors. So by measuring the voltage across these resistors, it can tell how much current is being drawn by the card. So what we're doing is telling the card that basically it's never drawing any current, so it'll always draw more current. What a dumb card. We'll trick it. This is fun. Until the card is broken, then it's less fun, but... I mean, that's inevitable. We haven't gotten there yet. It's not inevitable! That looks way better. So we say don't try this at home a lot, but for real this time, guys, we really don't recommend this. Yeah, this will void your warranty in many different ways. It will void your warranty. Yeah, it's not even... there's a good chance this will break your card. I think you're on. Yep, solid. Okay. Cool. Do we know that that's going to clear the cooler? Okay, it's interfering. So they had to be bent down like that in order to stay under these fins here. That should be fine. Four screws? Yep. That's lots. I mean, it's all it had to begin with. So is afterburner all we need to test this? Yeah. Cool. So as long as we... do we need something 3D to bump it over 300? Yeah, probably a good idea. And... No! So this being stuck at 300 megahertz is bad. All right. I'm not hooking up the RGB this time. What? No, I'm not doing it. The card won't work. Really? No. Oh, shut up. Show me the not 300 megahertz. So here we go. Yes! So this is good. So now what? You can increase the power target. Okay. But wait, that's it? That's basically it. That's the whole unlock? How do we get more voltage? That's how. Basically it goes to a higher power state than it would normally. Oh, all right. Well, hopefully that's good enough. Let's throw it on the chiller. So I'm just going to make sure that the pump on the chiller is working here. Yep, it's working. So as soon as we hook the bench up, boom, we can go sub-zero. So I'm a little disappointed that that's all there is. We don't really get any more dials to adjust. But we are still going to have some fun with this. Now, the original plan was actually to have a full cover block here in time. But it was supposed to arrive yesterday. And last I checked, it is not yesterday anymore. It is in fact today. And it isn't here. So we are going to have to raw dog it a little bit here. So we've got an old style. So GPU only block and some blowy matrons. And believe it or not, that is the strat. Oh, wow. So even though this GPU is enormous, the spacing of the mounting holes is actually really tight. So we are going to have to drill some new mounting holes for this CK block here. Do we want to just zip tie? No, let's not zip tie. I don't really see convenient anchor points for the zip ties. So we are going to be going full eyeball here. Because measuring is very time consuming. Get the jazz. Oh, apparently it will go there. My watch. I'm not taking my watch off. I do need safety goggles though. What? I know how to use a drill press. Yes. Yes, I took shop class. Is that just pushing the bit in right now? Shoot, I might not have tightened the bit enough. All right. Let's give it a shot. I mean, how bad could it be? Extra holes in there. These bolts are too thick for the holes in the card. So I will return with more nuts and more bolts. Dang it. My ancient collection of random water cooling crap might bail us out here. I was going to say one other option is taking the drill press to the card itself and widening the holes. Okay, now we find out if I got those holes right. Well, there's two kinds of right. Right and right enough. And we are at least one of them. I think I just found an old back plate that happens to have the same spacing. What the crap? Do we have thermal compound? Yep. We're on, but it's not tight enough. I need some washers. Oh, that's quite a bit better. So all that's left now is to replace our CPU cooler and all metal EK supremacy. I've got the mounting hardware here. I need to pull the Corsair stuff off first though. We're not going to do too much in the way of insulation. This is what is known as a suicide run. Yeah, let's throw a cryonaut on there because I don't know if those pads do sub zero. I am going to set up our anti-condensation solution. Blow emitrons pointed at the socket area. We need to get a couple of professional sealing devices on there if we can. Okay, I want a professional lubrication device first. Okay, so we need to hold on to these blow emitrons when we first start the system up to make sure that they don't take off and or move. So I've got the one back here. They will cut your finger. So by the frame is ideal. Yep. All right, so stuff's going to get pretty loud here, guys. Okay, now I'm getting a little stressed. Oh. Oh yeah, it wants to move. Mine's still not on. There it goes. Wait, no. It keeps trying to spin up and not being able to. CPU fan speed error detected, blah, blah, blah. Oh, but we have a post? Yeah. Okay. Oh, here we go. Mine's spinning. Cool. Okay. Whoo. Okay. So I need to prime that res. Dang it. They're a lot harder to get off once you zip tied them, which I guess is the idea. Just water. Now we got to fire up the CPU loop. Now this one just. Oh, shit. Where'd it go? Just readjust that there a little bit there. Oh, that pump is not happy. All right. This is some sketch stuff we got going on here today. Oh, boy. I think the CPU block is already frosting over. There's comments. Yeah, it's frost. There we go. Now we got airflow, baby. We need to see if that frost is going away with the airflow. We try five gigahertz. Okay. It posts at five. Yeah. Do we want to go further? Let's see if it gets to Windows first. I know that booting into Windows isn't really a good litmus test, but if I put it to 5.2 and it doesn't boot, then I know that five is probably stable. Oh, so we have two different kinds of blowees here. I'm going to switch this one to the CPU socket. This one is blowing so hard. It's pushing the condensation off the block. All right. We're Windows at 5.2. Windows at 5.2? All right. I don't know if I want to push it any further than that. Yeah, there's a little bit of condensation up top here. So let's just get some shop towel. So we want to make sure that that doesn't fall down onto our board. This is so dumb. Got another one working here. So I've actually got some condensation that's made its way to the board now. I'm not sure how to get it out. The CPU seems to be in a low power state right now. What? Yeah, we're back to what we had when we had the two shunts on. The sooner we can get a load on this CPU, the better off we're going to be. I need heat. Let me throw it up. Yeah, that's not stable. What are we at right now? 5.2. OK. Throw more volts at it? Could do that. OK, let's do that. What's the worst that can happen? We blow a $1,200 GPU and a $2,000 CPU and a $600 motherboard. Yeah, I know what the worst that can happen is. OK. You can see it's like splashing out of under by the socket there. There's actual splashes on the side of the RAM. I am floored that this is working still. No, it's just not stable at 5.2. OK. So the CPU itself is not that bad, but see there's an ice chunk right there in the socket. Yeah. You can see how wet our CPU is. OK, so everything's dried off. So I'm going to shop towel it up a little better than last time. I have another trick up my sleeve. I'm going to run the heat gun. I don't know how much it'll help, if at all. Is it on? Yep. What now? I lost the display output when Windows booted. Oh boy. A2? Yeah, that's a different one this time. We might need to boot in the safe boot if we don't get the BIOS this time around. Pretty sure this is not how this monitor is supposed to look. Here we go. Oh, all right. Stupid. OK. Oh, it's trying to run at 52 again, which is weird because I changed that down to... Wait, did I? I think I figured out why we weren't posting. OK. Show me that higher power state. Oh, yes. OK. GPU temps, 28 degrees. Not too shabby. Maybe it's not the most perfect thermal paste application. Could be that it's running firmer. Oh. Now we need to try and push the GPU without crashing. So first we want to have a look at the Hall of Fame here. Oh, dang. Jays2cents just got bumped out of the top 10 by three points. Oh, wait. No, this is... That's dual GPUs. So Jays and Steve are both in the top 10. Only one can remain. Well, technically they could both remain. We won't necessarily beat them. So we'll see if it's stable. Hopefully it is. No. Oh, sh**. Are you sure it's not the memory? I'll put it to zero and see what happens. All right, so this is just with the core clocks. Should we just try stock speeds and see if it's even working? Do that. So this is just what the power target's turned up. All right, what do we want to try then? Try 175 and 850. You sure 850? 850 is stable. It's a bit better. What are those other guys running? I'm not sure. Oh, OK. And there it goes. Mother****er. It looks like right before it crashed, it had tried to go to a higher power state. If we could lock it to a specific power state, that would be perfect. But I don't think we can do that. I certainly haven't found a way to do it. Like, it's entirely possible that one of our other cards does better at higher speeds. But because of the state transitions between low and high power, this one is actually the most stable at high clocks. Whoa. Oh, s**t. Did something short? That was the CPU test. I don't think that was the GPU that crashed. So the CPU may not be stable at 5. So this is one of those movie magic things where we go forward in time a couple of days because a lot has changed since the last update here. So first we figured out why the system we think was just crashing outright while running 3DMark. We were only running a thousand watt power supply. And between the overclocked 18 core and the RTX card, we could have easily been drawing more than a thousand watts. So we've added a second power supply whose entire job it is, is just to... Wait, what is this even being used for anymore? CPU on motherboard at this point. Just CPU right now. OK. But we were using it on the GPU, but anyway. So we've added a second power supply. We've adjusted our temperatures a little bit. We're not going quite so cold because the condensation was a real problem. And we've gone to a rampage 6 extreme here. Instead of the prime board we were using before. The good news is we think we're ready to rock you. Did you change the RAM too? Yes. Now what are we using? Slightly faster. Before we were using 2966. Right now we're using 3200 and it's got better timing. Finally, Anthony made some adjustments to the graphics card overclock. Yeah, so it should be a little bit more aggressive. We've boosted the clocks at maximum voltage and adjusted it so that it's less likely to crash when it's going between power state transitions. So what's our final CPU clock speed now? Final CPU clock speed is 4.8 on all cores. Do we have a chance to beat Jay and Steve with a single card here? Yes. They have very similar CPU clocks and our GPU clocks are higher. If we beat Jay then we have the second highest next to Kingpin I think. This is usually the part where the graphics card will crash. Yeah. So hold together, baby. Oh no! Try again, shall we? I think what we really need if we want to take it to the next level is an overclocking room. So when you're crashing at a pretty consistent stage in the benchmark, what that means is that something about that particular scene is stressing the GPU in a way that's causing it to become unstable. Now what we can do here is Anthony is actually digging around in all the different power states of the card and the frequencies that it's trying to run at and he's trying to smooth out that transition. So here he's looking at exactly what clock speed we were running at right at the moment that we crashed and then he's adjusting that portion of the curve. When this room opens up and we can see more of it, it's pretty challenging. Come on. This is the furthest we've made it so far for the full run. There's Gamers Nexus, 82.85. There's Days 2 Cent, 83.21. Something is wrong here. Something's wrong? This shouldn't be taking 40 milliseconds per frame. Okay, so we're not actually sure what happened with the CPU there, but we rebooted and it's back at 4.8 GHz now. But before we rerun, now that we've rebooted, there's a few things we've got to do to optimize our benchmark. We've got to turn off any unnecessary services like Adobe Update. We've got to wait a little bit for Windows to finish doing all of its boot up garbage. And then we're going to go ahead and hopefully this is going to be it. Are we expecting this to have posted by now? Not necessarily. Okay, cool. So hypothesis somewhat confirmed here. We're not actually in online mode. We're just passing through. And we're going all the way from 119 volts without firing this up, down to as low as 112 with 3DMark running. Now, theoretically, a computer power supply should be able to handle something like that. But we want every advantage that we can get here. So, where's the thing for that? Red label on top? What red label? Ugh! Okay, new plan. So I realized I don't actually know if this is a line interactive UPS. And in the time that I could look it up, I could also just run an extension cord to our server room, where I definitely have one of those. So here we go. We've got good news. That was one of the smoothest runs I've seen. I didn't notice any hitching or any graphical anomalies, nothing like that. And we know for sure our CPU overclock is working this time. All we needed was a $15,000 line interactive uninterruptible power supply system. Yeah, one that you have to roll in on a dolly. Yeah. Come on, baby. So we want this to be in the 30 millisecond range? Probably 30 milliseconds is what we're looking for. Okay. We're getting the odd frame that is taking quite a bit longer. So as a reminder, even though Jay is on Team Canada, which we have to respect, those are the targets. Oh, just calculate the score! Ugh. RTX overclocking part three. We might have found the overheating problem with our CPU cores. This is our flow rate right now. So we don't know exactly why that is at this time. The coolant is still viscous. Holy crap. Yeah, so our block is leaking a little bit. The weirdest thing about all of this is that if this is gummed up somehow, the coolant here is still clear, so I don't understand what it's gummed with. If this pump just died, that's going to be extremely inconvenient. So what I don't know about this block is whether it has, like, an accelerator plate or something in it, something that restricts the flow. It does. And we're gummed up. There's our problem. We've just got a bunch of, like, little debris and crap that's probably fallen into the res from the room that's all built up on the block. You know, I might even just remove this flow plate. So there's our inlet. We're going to take that accelerator plate out. This goes, yes, this way. And let's put this back on and see what happens. Maybe we can keep those temps under control now. So we're going to plug the pump back in. And what I'm expecting... is to see a lot more flow. That's more like it. Let's try again. So our CPU temps are already better. We are sub-zero right now. We were idling at, like, 15 or 20 before. Minus 4, minus 5. Okay, let's hit this test. I can't believe it. If that's what was holding us back all afternoon. So mad. I just want to be like, hey guys, and then just, okay, bye. It should be pretty stable around 30s. Yep. It's clean. I haven't even seen it spike to 35. It's clean. It's still clean. So just in case this drips down, I need to get this shop towel here. But I need a wrench to hold it down or blow. He's going to just blow it away. See? So let's just kind of, see? Perfect. As long as our CPU is not throttling, we could see a slight improvement to our GPU scores as well. I'm loading up the leaderboards again. No! No! Come on! One more time, one more time. That was a fluke. Yeah, fluke. So this time I'm not going to bring out the leaderboard. This has looked like a clean run. Okay. I'm doing it. I'm bringing up the leaderboard. Here we go. Are you sure? Come on, baby. Why? Why with the suspense? Watch the board finally succumb to condensation right now. Woo! Yeah! That's right, baby! All right, Anthony, you did all the work. Submit it. Woo! Number seven! You have the second best 1080 Ti next to Kingpin. After Kingpin. Oh, man. Oh, okay. Okay. Feeling good. And you know what else feels good? Telling you guys about Squarespace. Squarespace is the online website building service that lets you set up your own online presence easily and quickly. They've got award-winning 24-7 support via live chat and email. They've got seminars that you can attend. They've got their logo designer. They've got gorgeous templates that all look great on any screen because they all feature responsive design. Every Squarespace site includes an online store. So why wait? Go visit squarespace.com slash LTT. We're going to have that link below and try it out today. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, Jay, Steve, you guys know where it is. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts. Like, I don't know, I'm not wearing one right now, but they're cool. And our community forum, which you should definitely join. What an exercise in frustration this was. I'm going back off overclocking. I'm done.