As per multiple users across different communities, their newly purchased RTX 3080 graphics cards are experiencing repeated crashes (CTD) during gaming. Interestingly, most of these issues are localized to third party AIB partner cards, rather than the Founders Edition models.
One of the reasons behind these crashes may be due to unstable clocks. Board partners, after all, had very little time to test and optimize the Ampere chips for their custom designs. Most users reporting these issues own factory-overclocked boards with boost clocks higher than the FE cards: somewhere in the 1.9 to 2GHz.
The Founders’ Edition variant of the RTX 3080, on the other hand, has a boost clock of 1.71GHz. We already know that the Ampere graphics cards have a much higher TDP than the preceding Turing GPUs as well as ECC memory which makes it hard to detect possible unstable overclocks.
The memory chips also supposedly get quite hot reaching temps north of 100 degrees. Last but not the least, these GPUs use Samsung’s 8nm node which is a relatively unused process node. As such yields are likely uncertain and as a result, the expected clock speeds should also be quite average. This is most probably why the first batch of factory-overclocked AIB cards are seeing crashes. Not only is the overclocking overhead already low, but vendors have had little time to properly bin the GPU.
