This is especially true when you can achieve better than RTX 2060 performance at a fraction of the upgrade cost. It’s safe to say there’s a genuine incentive in implementing this mod. In fact, the modded GPU’s 3D Mark Time Spy GPU score of 7900 points put it a class above the newer Nvidia RTX 2060 with its relatively measly Time Spy score of 7600 points. However, the AIO liquid cooler mod netted a massive 20 percent performance improvement compared to the stock GPU. This is because Nvidia’s GPU Boost prevents the GPU from achieving the full OC potential owing to strict thermal restrictions. The results were astonishing.Įven after overclocking the GPU to the hilt, I could only manage to get 5.7 percent improvement in performance with the stock cooling setup. To find out if this works, I put the stock, overclocked, liquid-cooled versions of the same GPU through the paces using the 3D mark Time Spy graphics benchmark. Instead of losing money upgrading to a new Turing GPU, I added Corsair’s H80i v2 AIO liquid cooler onto my year old Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition GPU with the help of the NZXT Kraken G12 mounting kit. This can be achieved by adding a low-cost AIO liquid cooler onto the GPU. The idea is to drastically improve GPU cooling to leverage the propensity of Nvidia GPU Boost to allow for higher sustained clock speeds when thermal headroom is available. However, if you own a last generation Nvidia Pascal card, there’s a cheaper alternative to upgrading performance without having to buy a new Turing GPU. Nvidia GPU Boost ensures that you can’t close the performance gap between the two GPU generations with a simple overclock. That’s precisely why Nvidia was brave enough to launch Turing graphics cards with barely any performance advantage over their predecessors. In short, your painstakingly-achieved manual overclock matters little when GPU Boost dictates clock speeds based on GPU thermal parameters. That makes the maximum achievable clockspeed with Pascal (GTX 10xx series) and Turing (RTX 20xx series) GPUs largely dependent on the available thermal headroom. It also conveniently hobbles overclockers by severely limiting control over important overclocking parameters such as voltage and power draw. On the surface it delivers the benefits of automatic overclocking to the masses. Leveraging GPU Boost with Liquid CoolingĮnter Nvidia GPU Boost.

There’s a method to Nvidia’s apparent madness.

Let’s just say that Nvidia didn’t rack up a revenue of $12 billion in 2018 by letting overclockers undercut its bottom line. Both Nvidia and AMD have densely packed product stacks, with GPUs separated by as little as $30 increments.

Aio cooler carry on