Novice Question: Need Help Understanding Thermal Limit Data For My RTX 3090

[Moon]

Hi

I recently installed hwinfo to watch temps on my rtx 3090. My card runs hot and I wanted to know if it was thermal throttling under heavy load or just running a little hot, but otherwise ok.

When I look at the GPU data on hwinfo, specifically the "Thermal Limit", I noticed it is set to 83 Celsius. After reading up on the card elsewhere that seemed like a low limit for the card to be set to throttle itself back. I was under the impression that, while not ideal at all, these cards could actually reach into the 90s even before ever having to suffer throttling and performance drops.

Is 83c a common thermal limit?

While gaming my temps tend to avg around 78 and under heavy load sit at around 80-81 celsius with an occasional spike to that thermal limit of 83.

Any help or info at all would be much appreciated. Thanks

 

[Broxi]

Hit there I’m not 100% on the 40 series cards but I do know the likes of 1080 and 2080 super have thermal throttle limits of 83c & 84c respectively. My old 1080ftw card regularly ran between 78-82c occasionally throttling. The card I have now the evga 2080 super ultra xc is never anywhere near that mostly runs about 67-68c under load and the highest I’ve seen it go is 72c. However I did get a false report tonight from hwinfo64 where is said it had temperature limit. I checked max temps 68c so unsure what happened there but reset the stats and didn’t seem to do it again.

 

[Moon]

Hey thanks for the reply!

Yeah the 3090 was an unplanned upgrade and is in a case that really does not have great airflow at all-to the point where I often just game with the side panel off and get temps line 7-8 degrees colder.

But yeah this MSI Suprim runs really hot in general it seems.

83 seems low to me to throttle the card though considering how high techs often state the card can get before anything serious would happen.

 

[Broxi]

Yeah the thing is the card throttles to protect its self from damage. So your clock speeds etc will drop temporarily to get the temperature to where it wants it. But airflow and case have a massive bit to play in helping temps to. I had my 1080ftw in a fractal define mini c and my 1080 would be regularly up at 83/84c. I then changed to a full size Atx fractal meshify 2 lite and it massively helped my 1080 never really throttled after that. My understanding of the set throttle limits for the cards are set by nivida drivers and as such hwinfo has no control over them. Another thing to be aware of is that due to boost 3.0 you will sometimes get a yes notification for thermal throttling in hwinfo but if your temps are within reason ignore that as it’s something to do with the way boost 3.0 works on nivida cards causes it to report as if it has throttled for a micro second when it really hasn’t throttled at all.

 

[Moon]

Good to know! Yeah the case is...not great for this size card running this hard. Oh well. I get top temps of 74-75c when I have side panel off - good enough for me for now until I place all this in a better case. Luckily the noctua keeps the cpu chilly.

I basically just made myself a little latch so the side panel is only ever off for a few hours while gaming and I can place it back on quick and easy to keep dust down when not in use. I know that's not great but...