A YouTuber is working on a rather unusual DIY project: installing a server-grade water-cooling kit on an RTX 3080. The effects are immediately noticeable, as performance is cut in half, clock speeds increase, and frame rates in video games do the same. The setup is homemade, but it works great!
RTX 3080: He’s installing an Arctic W360 AIO to cool his graphics card!
Temperatures cut in half!
The choice of water cooling kit wasn’t random—he went with an Arctic WS360. This kit, designed for large sockets, has a base wide enough to cool both the GPU and the memory chips—a real godsend. He just needs to figure out how to keep the kit in place, but that won’t be a problem.
Once the pump is mounted on the card, the least we can say is that the setup is effective. Temperatures are, quite simply, cut in half! The GPU drops from 62.5°C to 35.6°C, while the VRAM drops from 101.6°C to 49.6°C—a drastic reduction!
Higher clock speeds and increasedFPS!
Naturally, with temperatures nearly halved, clock speeds rise more easily. Consequently, in its default configuration, the card goes from 1941 MHz to 1996 MHz. When overclocked, the gains are even greater, as we gain nearly 200 MHz, going from 1990 MHz to 2183 MHz.
Naturally, this has a positive impact onin-game frame rates. In Cyberpunk, we see an increase of approximately 4.7% (from 107FPS to 112FPS ), compared to ~8.2% in Tomb Raider, going from 159 FPS to 172 FPS. Forza Horizon 5 goes from 186 to 198FPS (6.45%),Assassin’s Creed Mirage reaches 108 FPS compared to 101 FPS previously (6.93%), and Far Cry 6 reaches 140FPS instead of 133FPS (5.26%).
This just goes to show that there’s everything to gain from having properly cooled hardware. This requires effective heat dissipation from the graphics card, but also a properly ventilated case. Because if heat builds up, the internal components suffer as well.
