Pretty much the title, I'm just curious if their hydro copper cards are binned higher/more carefully than other FTW3 Ultras. Is it higher or exactly the same as any other air cooled version of their cards?
Thanks!
Posted Oct 17, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC
Email [email protected] and you’ll get the actual answer from the manufacturer.
Awesome, i'll give it a shot. I did a lazy tweet over to Jacob since I heard he got back to people most the time but I forgot that yeah, email would probably work too heh
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I highly doubt FTW3 HC are binned beyond their advertised clocks. My 3080 FTW3 Hydro Copper is not stable over 1950 mhz for long periods regardless of how much power is being pushed through it.
Edit: Something to note is that Hydro Copper boards are made specifically for the HC line. They supposedly use caps that are a different height which also makes the aircooled FTW3 boards incompatible with the HC waterblock.
Do you just up the power or do you try to overlock it as well?
I've tried both raising the power limit and manual overclocking.
Out of the box it can auto boost to 1980 mhz for a couple of seconds but ends up settling at a little over 1900 mhz while consuming up to ~400w. It's kind of silly that it's stable at 1890 mhz @ 900mv with a peak power consumption of ~290w but the top end isn't far away. Anything above 2000 mhz will blackscreen immediately.
Before I got the HC, I had an air cooled b-stock 80 ftw3 that could peak at 2050 mhz out of the box and I've seen some videos where people had their aircooled cards up to 2100-2200 mhz.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter too much to me since I went with a custom loop for silence rather than pushing limits. Plus, the Hydro Copper blocks have a somewhat outdated design that doesn't perform as well as a modern block with a jet plate. It's my favorite looking design since almost every other block doesn't obscure the PCB.
Hmmm, this post is almost making me consider just putting an EKWB block on my 3080 Ti FE I managed to nab. I'm still on the notify list for the 3080ti Ftw3 ultra HC so I'm trying to figure out what I want ahead of time. But yeah, I really like the design of the waterblock on the HCs too, it's a shame to hear they aren't as efficiently cooling as other aftermarket blocks.
Do they actually bin anything? I was under the impression they just slap 50-150 overclock on everything, and RMA the fallout. I fucking hate that we can't buy a stock clock EVGA card for any price right now.
They don't actually do an OC on their cards on the bios level. I've confirmed this with an EVGA rep. The different ultra/non ultra bullshit basically means "we've verified this card hits at least the boost clock specified by this product sku (ultra, gaming, black, xc3, ftw3, etc). So it basically is shitty binning where you're guaranteed at least to be above the number They specify.
Sometime late in the 20XX series cards Nvidia themselves stopped binning the dies. Previously the 104 A (or whatever) would be the better bin and now there is no A version. Manufacturers like EVGA would put those in their ftw3 ultras or MSI would put them in their Gaming X Trio or whatever the companies flagship might be. Since there is no pre-binning in the 30XX cards from Nvidia there are much less or likely no binned cards depending on brand and model.
It's possible that the most extreme overclocking variants could be binned by the manufacturers themselves and maybe the Kingpin cards are but, I find that kind of unbelievable. It's one thing to get the die straight from the maker and be told which are the best ones but, it's a totally different thing for a card maker to sort and bin all of their dies on their own . Factories would have to be equipped to even test like that in an incomplete card because no one is desoldering and resoldering dies to move them around. Just doesn't seem realistic
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I believe they only bin between Ultra and non-Ultra, the only true binned card is the Kingpin.
I've asked the same from EVGA and got the following answer (that was not much of an answer):
Our Card, the FTW3 Ultra, is one of our strongest cards, besides the Kingpin of course.
Therefore, we have chosen high quality chips, to provide the performance, that our customers are looking for. However, we do not have the value, of how many chips are on it. This is only avialable to our product management team.
We hope, that we could answer your question so far and in case, that you have some further ones, don't hesitate and contact us again.
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They aren’t binned. I’ve had access to 4 of them and they are all average and comparable to a FTW3 or TUF.
It may have been the case for early cherry picked press samples or the ones that got into customers hands late last year but I see no indication of binning currently.
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