These BIOS updates raise the power ceiling on Gigabyte’s RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 cards

News
By published

A higher power ceiling can help maintain boost clocks for a longer period of time, depending on temps.

It's still early to know if Nvidia's GeForce RTX technology lives up to the hype and is worth the pricing premium. However, if you bit the bullet on a fancy new RTX graphics card anyway and went with a Gigabyte model, you might have access to a BIOS update that could help maintain boost speeds.

A user who purchased a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming OC card complained on the company's community forum that "it wasn't a cheap card and it hits the power limit instantly."

"I can rise it up to 109 percent, that's it. I saw reviews from Founders Edition cards that can be set to 124-130 percent. It seems a bit low for a card with a triple fan layout," the user wrote. "My temps are below 60 degrees (around 50-52 degrees) but the card is getting limited by its power target."

He asked if Gigabyte planned to release a BIOS update that would rectify this, and Gigabyte responded by doing exactly that, as noticed by TechPowerUp.

"Ask and you shall receive," Gigabyte-Matt posted in response.

There are now BIOS updates for four models: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 Gaming OC, and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 Windforce OC. Gigabyte-Matt warns that users should save the backup BIOS to the cloud (like Google Drive) in case things go wrong.

The default power limit for all four cards is 260W. Applying the BIOS updates increases that all the way to 366W. However, it should be noted that they don't adjust the temperature limits. If your card hits 84C, you can still expect throttling.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).