MSI introduced this feature in 2008 and most of the AIB cards followed suite with the 9xx series. Unless water cooled, we choose this option on every build. You can disable it, by using MSI Afterburner utility though don't understand why anyone would ever want to. As far as any GPU, CPU or any other chip goes, you want to keep the temps below the point where throttling affects performance; you don't get "bonus points" for it being lower. Without the feature, your card would be under 30C or so at idle which is just a teeny bit above typical interior case air temps. Note it's only 35C at full load.
You’d be surprised. There are many of us that do it, here on this forum. It’s easier to keep the temps out of the stratosphere when it is being actively cooled. Some of the odle off features don’t stop staying idle till temps are 50 or more. At that point, there is not a lot of room before modern cards start throttling. My experience is when you get ahead of it, that rarely happens.
1. I have a hard time associating mid to upper 60's the "stratosphere". At full load the card is at 67C
2. With recent cards w/ Boost 3, this seems to be more of an effect imposed by power throttling rather than temperature.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080/30.html
"These are very good results, but the GTX 1080 seems to be limited by the board's power limit and temperatures going above 83°C, "
With the 1660 Ti's max power on AIB cards sitting at around 150 watts, one would thing that the power delivery's circuitry capable of 225 watts, this wouldn't be an issue.
3. What card in a series you are using has an impact here. Note the FE throttles badly, the MSI Gaming X is a straight line.
https://videocardz.com/60838/msi-geforce-gtx-1080-gaming-x-is-much-better-than-founders-edition
My thinking is that when we talk about the logic of putting fan speeds up, the logic stems from the slight "stepdowns" you see on the blue line in left pic depending on the card, these are even and run from 12-13 depending on the card. To put in perspective though, you really have to look out how small that is on the right. That 2st step down is immeditely upon starting usage.... temps are in low 50s.... the 2nd is at about 63-64. So here's the questions:
a) If the game is putting such a low load on the card that it's barely above idle temps with fans off (50C) , do you really need that extra 12 Mhz... is it actually going to impact game play ?
b) If the game is driving the temps to 63-64C you can be 100% sure that the fans have kicked on.
So what those graphs are telling us is that at the 1st drop, the game load is so low, the card obviously doesn't need that 12 Mhz and with the 2nd drop, the fans are already on and at just 3C away fro max temp.
c) I also suspect, that as often as not, if ya set your OCs for max fps instead of max stable core / memory, you can avoid those .... that's why the test results show bigger fps, because the limiters are not in play just yet
4. I have seen some posters who tested test their cards with water and noted that when they kept their cards in the mid 40s, they were able to maintain higher clocks with boost 3. Have not tested it myself, the air cooled boxes are generally on mid 60s to mid 70s at max load w/ OC and the WC cards never go above 39C to 42C. No matter what ya do with the curves, you're not getting into the 40s on air and even with fans off I can't get into 60s on water.
5. The other thing I touched on above is that max core OC / memory OC is not the goal as it doesn't get you the highest fps. You will notice if ya look into the details on Wiz's reviews that the fastest core / faster memory OC's never result in the max OC fps wise. Looking at the TPU 2080 Ti testing (7 cards with Micron memory) for example, the Zotac hit the highest average boost core (2145) OC was 4th place in fps; the Asus hit the highest memory (2065) OC was 3rd place in fps. The fps winner, was the MSI Gaming Trio w/ 2,085 / 2005 OCs, I set up a Matrix in a spreadsheet each time and will have starting point of 1450 and go up by +25 in each columns to 1650, then on memory start at 1850 and go to 2050 in the rows. In my experience, I'll get the best fps about 2/3 - 3/4 across the columns and down the rows.... never at the max stable core / max stable memory numbers.
Unfortunately, since the nVidia cards have gotten so efficient, and as a result no need for excessive fan speeds.... sound levels of 35 dbA or so don't warrant an investment in water GFX card cooling for most folks. I'll give it a shot on next build but no planned builds till May, Meanwhile, would be a great TPU article.
