Is it possible to passively cool a GeForce RTX 3080?

Mical Wong, the founder of fanless case maker Turemetal, put his flagship product, the UP10 chassis, to the test with a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. We know that NVIDIA's GPU is capable of deafening a lot of power, so dissipating the heat produced without the aid of fans should be quite problematic. During the system configuration, Wong inserted the Asus TUF GeForce RTX 3080 into a computer also equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, a rather efficient CPU with not too high consumption. Initially, the man launched Furmark to push the GPU to the maximum, posting the following result:

Credit: Turemetal, Mical Wong As you can see, the initial GPU temperature was only 18 ° C and reached the high of about 87 ° C before Wong finished the test, but the temperature had not actually stabilized yet. This was probably a wise choice, as the reported GPU temperature is not identical to the peak temperature on the GPU die, but it already shows system limitations. The CPU did not experience any significant load during this test and we must also point out that Wong was running the test in a very cold room: 13.6 ° C with around 64% humidity. These are excellent conditions for a passively cooled PC, but less so for humans, especially when gaming. According to measurements, the system consumed around 410W under load and apparently Wong was attempting to run the RTX 3080 at full capacity.

Credit: Turemetal, Mical Wong Just as people optimize various parameters of the GPU to increase their efficiency when mining and maximize profits, we believe the same concept could also be applied here to strike a balance thermal. Lowering the clock rate in Afterburner, lowering the power limit and perhaps even lowering the GPU voltage via BIOS modding, while potentially dangerous, could in fact help further.

NZXT C850 is the right power supply if you want to try your hand at overclocking, with 850W of power and 80Plus Gold certification. You can find it on Amazon.