Wednesday, February 17th 2021
Passively Cooled RTX 3080 PC Comes With A Few Compromises
The NVIDIA RTX 3080 is a 320 W TDP card making it impractical for conventional contained passive cooling solutions. Commercial passively cooled cards such as the GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1650 Ti all come in with a TDP of less than 100 W and even then require large heatsinks. Mical Wong, the founder of Turemetal a company specializing in passively cooled computers has managed to create a passively cooled PC with an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 5 5600X. The PC features the companies flagship Turemetal UP10 case.
The system booted but was unusable at stock settings with the RTX 3080 quickly overwhelming the cooling system when running at 100%. The GPU reached 87 degrees Celsius within minutes when running Furmark with a total system power draw of 410 W. The Turemetal UP10 is only officially rated for 300 W system cooling so the fact that this worked at all is quite impressive. With some CPU, and GPU configuration and power limiting, it would appear feasible to create such a system assuming you could afford it.
Source:
@turemetal
The system booted but was unusable at stock settings with the RTX 3080 quickly overwhelming the cooling system when running at 100%. The GPU reached 87 degrees Celsius within minutes when running Furmark with a total system power draw of 410 W. The Turemetal UP10 is only officially rated for 300 W system cooling so the fact that this worked at all is quite impressive. With some CPU, and GPU configuration and power limiting, it would appear feasible to create such a system assuming you could afford it.
19 Comments on Passively Cooled RTX 3080 PC Comes With A Few Compromises
Smaller, lower power passive PCs though, yeah, that's awesome. This right here is just... super heavy.
I was impressed until I zoomed in on the Furmark temperature graph. It's at almost 90C and looking at the graph it probably still has 10-15C to go before the line straightens out.
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You can't do much with coil whine, but I personally find pump noise in liquid cooling to be more distracting than fans, mostly due to being higher pitched. I gave up on liquid cooling mostly for that reason (also, it just doesn't make sense for my use case), I prefer to have a semi-passive air cooled system. Fully passive is probably a niche edge case, but passive cases have one advantage - strap a slow moving, completely silent fan to it and you'll never hear it.
My new D5 isn't running very hard and as a result the pump noise is practially inaudible. Certainly coil whine in those few menus that run at 1000fps is definitely a far bigger problem than the gentle hum of the pump.
I put a D15 on a.8600K at 0.98v 4.0GHZ. FPU temp stable at 80C.
However for GPU it is impossible without a case like that. So I removed the fan of my 1080Ti, and attached a Noctua A15 at 600RPM. With a little bit curve adjustment lock at 0.943v 1950MHZ. It stables at 76C.
Noctua A15 at 600RPM is quieter than the GPU coil whine, so I am fine with it.
Watch the LTT video
My quietest PC doesn't have to be silent, I have a large open-plan living room/kitchen and the gentle hum of the refridgerator's compressor at the opposite end of the room means that any fans in that room's PC running below 800rpm are completely inaudible. For gaming loads I tolerate the GPU fans at 1500rpm beacuse, hey, games make more noise than the fans too!
thats not comfortable