Hey folks, trying to avoid a wall of text as I just would like some feedback from the electrical wizards that reside in this thread. I haven't used this website since 2014 when I was a freshman in college... how time has passed and how funny to see 780 Ti and Korean IPS owner clubs in my sig. Have been using reddit pretty extensively since for the computer hardware forums, but nice to be back.
Anyway, I have followed this thread as a lurker pretty thoroughly for the past couple months because I've had a 3090 FE I got from Best Buy in late October. For the most part, love the card, but she's got a bit of coil whine and in general clocks can be all over the place due to being super power limited, however I'm clearly preaching to the choir.
So, over the past couple months, I've also noticed my fan curve being overridden under certain workloads with no specific reasoning to 100% which even with my wireless Hyper X Cloud II's is audible and annoying. Further research shows, similar to this thread and others, that my memory junction temp is hitting a TJ max of 110c which is obviously stupid hot and sure enough is what's causing my fans to ramp to 100%.
Of course, this all meant it was time to take apart the GPU and re-thermal pad it as well as shunt-modding while I'm in there. Now I did the
only silver paint method despite soldering my whole life as I was still too worried about the risk associated and the resistors are in a few tight spots I just deemed I couldn't do without being drenched in sweat after doing just one. I also mistakenly only got a single thermal grizzly thermal pad kit and not 3 like I'm supposed to (just reordered 3 packs and they come Thursday so I plan to redo this and likely add more silver paint if necessary).
So I only did the backplate and it was hardly enough but I made it work, just not to my expectation, but that's what I get for not reading I need 3. I taped around all my resistors, scraped the coating off of the ends of the shunts, and very carefully painted the actual resistor from end to end trying to make as much meaningful contact as possible. I also tried to make each one as consistent as the last obviously so we don't piss off Nvidia's power balancing.
Now, the results were interesting! I did this all at work and brought the card home and fired her up no issues. Under load, the memory junction temp was definitely better by a few degrees and didn't get as hot as fast, but it inevitably still gets to about 106 on a long gaming session or benchmark and that's what I get for not reading everything around buying 3 kits... Still an improvement and most importantly I can still use my card until then. The other thing is that is
definitely helped despite me not being able to really gauge a power difference. Check this out:
Previous results with the 3090 maxed out in every way in my 9900KF build:
Port Royal:
I scored 13 511 in Port Royal
Time Spy Extreme:
I scored 9 334 in Time Spy Extreme
New results last night with my 5950x somewhat dialed in:
Port Royal:
I scored 13 830 in Port Royal
Time Spy Extreme:
I scored 10 775 in Time Spy Extreme
Obviously besides a higher score, but look at those sustained clocks!!! That's a significant improvement over my past average clock in both benches and just in general I could immediately tell it wasn't dipping down into the 1800MHz and 1900MHz range in some loads anymore which is great. This card literally would dip down as far as 1890 depending on the workload no matter what slider I maxed out. Now, the lowest I was seeing was 1980MHz and some points and that was super rare... also, lower peak clocks, but maybe that's a driver thing? Not sure, I was hitting 2200MHz before somehow granted it performed worse so maybe a moot point. I know HAGS for sure affects it, but I'm 90% sure I had it on in the first benches too.
What's weird to me is what GPU-Z is showing and I'm hoping I can squeeze just a hair more out of the card considering what it shows:
View attachment 2479088
This screenshot was taken after one of my earlier runs yesterday before I maxed the voltage slider (which seems to do literally nothing this gen and especially for this card) and also before Windows's HAGS was turned on (which effectively lowers my clocks a bit but gives me a pretty hefty performance gain), but my power slider was maxed in MSI afterburner. Notice that pin 1 and 2 are slightly different and during some benches, they can be usually as far apart as 35w as well as pin 2 is almost always .1v higher than the other... clearly I knew these would change so I thought they'd still stay the same, but again, I definitely saw a performance improvement related to power so it's far from a negative. From what I remember at the very least is that "Board power draw" shows no difference from stock as it should be around 400w to begin with, but I figured this would actually show less despite truly drawing more power.
Anyway that's mostly what I've got. I ran an insane amount of benches last night if you need any more to look at, but I'm really hoping one of the shunt mod gurus in here can give me an idea of what I'm dealing with, what my numbers mean, why the pins are different, how I can push it a bit more (by re-shunt-modding), and maybe give me an idea of what I'm actually pulling power-wise now. I hooked up the kill-a-watt last night and saw all of a 400w jump from when the benchmark would load (2% GPU usage) to when it started and went to 100% usage, so it's definitely there if not pulling more. I also now know with my current CPU settings and the card maxed, I should see around 670w from the wall give or take so I can use this for reference if I redo the shunt mod to find any differences.
Thanks for reading and thank in advance for your time and help!