One of the biggest changes that we will see in the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards will be the use of GDDR6X with a much higher transfer rate. However, it is possible to overclock the GDDR6X of an RTX 3090 Ti to go from 21 Gbps to 24 Gbps. With this we can know if the most powerful of the RTX 30 is limited by the bandwidth of its memory.
It is no secret that GPUs are no longer what they were in their beginnings, since their usefulness has gone beyond displaying graphics and they have become systems capable of performing calculations in many areas at high speed. We first saw its evolution towards the world of scientific computing and lately this has evolved into artificial intelligence. Something that at first glance should not affect us home PC users, but it is like saying that the technology developed for F1 will not affect street PCs.
All advances have led to a performance model in which improvements to graphics cards come from two different paths, depending on which is the limiting factor: bandwidth or computing power. Since not everything that runs a processor has the same costs. So it is always interesting to know how the potential of any GPU improves when we increase the speed of one of its parts. In this case it is about overclocking to the GDDR6X of an RTX 3090 Ti.
How does GDDR6X overclocking affect an RTX 3090 Ti?
The RTX 3090 Ti is a graphics card that makes use of the new graphics card connector, capable of running in four power modes: 150W, 300W, 450W and 600W. Of the four we think the connector will only use the two latest and specifically the latest NVIDIA card takes the 450 W mode. To that, of course, we must add the additional 75 W that the PCI Express port delivers by itself. The base consumption of the models that are on the street? 480 W , so this means that up to 525 W of consumption there is a certain margin, which allows overclocking.
However, due to the difficulty of increasing the speed of the graphics processor, it has been decided to overclock the GDDR6X to put it from 21 Gbps to 24 Gbps . Which translates to your bandwidth rising above 1.1 TB/s of bandwidth. Not in vain, the fact of making a 6.2% increase in the GPU clock speed means going from 480 W to 516 W as you can see in the information below.
We have no information about the increase in consumption due to increasing the speed of the graphics memory, what we are sure of is that not all RTX 3090 Ti support this increase, since they are rather designed to cool the central processor of the card graph. Therefore, for an exercise of this type, a more advanced cooling system is recommended.
The fact is that one type of application that benefits the most from the increase in bandwidth is cryptocurrency mining and indeed, you can see how the RTX 3090 Ti with overclocking to GDDR6X has a mining rate of up to 134 MH /s. Which shows that, at least for mining, said graphics card has a considerable bottleneck.