I thought this would be simple, overclock a GTX 1080 Ti hard enough to embarrass NVIDIA’s new RTX 5050. On paper, the 1080Ti should win.
Easy video idea, right?
Except the 1080 Ti turned into a nightmare.
The first card died almost immediately. The second one was an absolute potato, wouldn’t clock for shit. The third? It just sat there like a brick. I spent days with this thing, playing with curves, offsets, drivers (I must’ve cycled through half a dozen, weirdly, 577 ended up performing the best), switching DX11 and DX12 back and forth, running it on a coolant loop holding –3 C, VRMs chilled separately, anything to make it move.
Nothing. 2000–2050 MHz stable, maybe a flicker of 2150 on a lucky run, but 2200 might as well have been a brick wall. No matter what I did, it just refused.
By this point the “1080 Ti beats 5050” idea was dead, and I was ready to throw the card through a wall. Out of frustration I turned to the 5050 I’d bought specifically to be humiliated by the Ti and thought, fine… what can you do?
I bolted a CPU cooler to it (the die is so small a water block won’t even fit), dropped temps by about 30 C, load was sitting around 43 C, and just shoved as much offset as it would take. No fancy curve adjustments, just raw offset.
The thing clocked to 3300 MHz.
Seventeen percent FPS uplift. Across everything. The RTX 5050 went from “the opponent” to absolutely destroying the 1080 Ti, and suddenly this whole project went completely off the rails.
It’s now top score overall on Timespy. Top 6 graphics scores.
The bench, for anyone curious, stock CPU for stock GPU runs, then an i5‑12600KF locked at 5.3 GHz with the e‑cores off for all the overclocked runs. 32 GB DDR4‑3200 CL16. 1440p DX12. No DLSS, no FSR. Driver 577.
This started as me trying to push an old flagship. It turned into a 3300 MHz RTX 5050 science experiment I didn’t see coming.
Video if you're interested https://youtu.be/D1gf638YMfk
1 Comment
You’ve transformed this period of frustration into a good video mate. I quite enjoyed it, maybe it was for the best that you ended up giving the 5050 a shove, took top spot!!
Now it took three cards, but 2150+ is pretty good without a unlocked bios, your super low temp did good work there too but anything else is out of your hands on stock bios / silicon lottery things.
Even though you didn’t hit the goldilocks 2200+, it’s a solid clock. 1080tis problem is stock boosts to near 2ghz already which means overclocking isn’t as significant by comparison to if they only boosted to 1700.
That air cooler 5050@3300mhz just sipping power compared to the 1080ti is humbling! The tech now…
Really cool.
But because I’m a die-hard 1080ti respecter. I gotta say you were just shy of my timespy score and timespy gpu score,
So my 1080ti lives another day beating the 5050 by a hair and probably get eaten alive in games. And don’t mention the power draw, rip. Please don’t haha.
Here’s the compare link for curiosity. I’ve not yet run 2200+ benches suite yet. https://www.3dmark.com/compare/spy/57264226/spy/57663562