Introduction
On January twenty ninth, 2025 we reviewed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition video card, with availability on January thirtieth, for a retail MSRP of $999. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition is practically a GeForce RTX 5090 cut in half, on performance, and price. Its performance wasn’t quite as expected, with some gains above the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, nevertheless it never achieved near GeForce RTX 4090 performance as we might need hoped.
There’s one component of the GeForce RTX 5080 to explore that might improve its value, and that will be overclocking. Will overclocking help the GeForce RTX 5080? Will it make it more exciting? How good is the silicon at pushing up the clock speed? All of those questions we aim to explore in our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 overclocked review.
In the event you are unfamiliar with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 please try our GeForce RTX 5080 FE review, we focused on the Founders Edition model, and that’s what we can be overclocking today. Here’s a quick run-down of the GeForce RTX 5080 specifications in case you missed them. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 utilizes the GB203 GPU based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and is the successor to the GeForce RTX 4080 based on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture. The GB203 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 is predicated on the TSMC 4nm 4N NVIDIA custom process, which is identical because the previous generation Ada Lovelace. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 supports a PCI-Express 5.0 (Gen5) interface.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 consists of seven GPCs, 42 TPCs, and 84 SMs with 128 CUDA Cores per SM. While you add all this up, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 has 10,752 CUDA Cores, 336 fifth Gen Tensor Cores, 84 4th Gen RT Cores, 112 ROPs and 336 Texture Units. The L1 Data Cache/Shared memory size is 10752KB, and the L2 cache size is 65536KB. The GPU Boost Clock is about at 2617MHz. Memory consists of 16GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit memory bus at 30Gbps giving it 960GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TGP (Total Graphics Power) is 360W.
How To Overclock GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition
With a purpose to overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition, we want software, and that is where MSI stepped as much as the plate and sent us a brand new beta version of MSI Afterburner that fully supports the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. With this new edition of MSI Afterburner and this recent UI design, we were in a position to control the Power Limit, Core frequency, Memory frequency, Fan Speed, and even Voltage.
Within the above screenshot, you can find our highest-stable overclock on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition. You’ll be able to see that the Power Limit was in a position to be pushed up 8% from 100%. It will be significant to notice that that is what it’s on the Founders Edition specifically, as with a partner card, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC LAUNCH EDITION Video Card, it allowed an 11% increase to the ability limit, giving it more overclocking range. Subsequently, the Founders Edition does have a rather lower allowable TDP range for overclocking. We also set the fan speed to 80% to make sure the very best overclock, this increased the noise level quite a bit, nevertheless it ensured we weren’t held back thermally for our GPU or memory frequency.
In our overclocking, we found that keeping the Voltage at default was the very best, to take care of an overclock that didn’t exceed the TDP and throttle clock speed. It was clear that more Voltage would have allowed a rather higher clock frequency, but with a lower TDP limit keeping the Voltage at default allowed the clock speed to be maintained higher, and more consistent, however the Voltage slider did work if you would like to experiment with a little bit more Voltage to the GPU. Subsequently, we didn’t raise the Voltage for this overclock.
Our highest stable overclock had the Core frequency set at +350 and the Memory frequency at +500MHz. You will note what this leads to on the graph below, by way of real-world gaming frequency. It is a bit lower than the MSI video card we overclocked, nevertheless it is smart with less TDP and fewer Voltage. This still pushed the frequency above 3GHz, as much as 3.1GHz as you’ll see below, which is great. We could push it up barely higher with Voltage, but again that ate into the TDP and ultimately gave inconsistent frequencies. It was higher to take care of a no Voltage increase, and just raise the frequency.
On the memory side of things, the default memory clock frequency is 30Gbps, and with +500, this increased the memory to 31Gbps. That is near the boundaries of the memory; it’s already clocked higher than the GeForce RTX 5090, which is 28Gbps, and on that card, we also hit 31Gbps for the memory overclock, so this is smart. On this 256-bit memory bus, the default memory bandwidth is 960 GB/sec, with the memory overclocked to 31Gbps, the brand new overclocked memory bandwidth is 992 GB/sec, a rise of just 3% more memory bandwidth. With a memory overclock that small, many of the performance difference will, due to this fact, be coming from the GPU frequency overclock.
Remember that the GeForce RTX 5080 has a GPU Boost clock of 2617MHz, nevertheless, due to NVIDIA Boost technologies the actual gaming frequency boost is higher than this given power, TDP, and thermal headroom. In our GeForce RTX 5080 FE review, we checked out the GPU Frequency at default. The common GPU Boost at default is 2760MHz-2790MHz while gaming, with a median of 2773MHz.
With our highest stable overclock of +350 on the Core frequency, and eight% more power, you’ll be able to see that the clock frequency while gaming has increased. We at the moment are getting frequencies between 3110MHz-3130MHz. The actual average of the overclock frequency is 3124MHz. Subsequently, if we compare the overclock (3124MHz) to the default GPU Boost of 2773MHz the overclock provides a big 12.6% GPU clock frequency overclock or 351MHz overclock on average, which is a considerable overclock on frequency.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition Overclocking final overclock is: 3124MHz/31Gbps (core/mem).
