Fanless, passively cooled GeForce RTX 3080 – Can it be?

The new high-end gaming video cards of Nvidia they are as powerful as they are demanding from an energy point of view and for this reason, under load, they reach high temperatures. The GeForce RTX 3080 is accompanied by a TGP of 320W and to cool it you need a rather impressive active heatsink as we have seen both on the Founders Edition and the custom proposals of the partners.

Over the years, only a few low-end video card models have landed on the market with totally passive coolers and there will certainly be no changes in the future unless some revolutionary new material is discovered. However, it is interesting to see what Mical Wong, patron of Turemetal, a company specializing in cases for the creation of totally passive PCs. Wong’s new project is formed precisely by una GeForce RTX 3080 (TUF Gaming) e una CPU Ryzen 5 5600X, which we have seen to be an excellent complement to any modern gaming system, all housed inside a Turemetal UP10 case.

Wong ha shared some photos on Twitter, showing how the system at stock settings obviously reaches high temperatures, with the GeForce RTX 3080 GPU which hit 87 ° C (but the curve suggests that it could rise even more) after a few minutes of testing with Furmark, while the total system consumption jumped to 410W (347W only for the video card, which among other things we have tested here, in addition to the 320W of the FE due to higher than standard frequencies). The indicated temperature is not an excessive value for the GPU (at least not for a sporadic load), but we know that inside the chip there are hot spots that reach much higher values, not to mention that we do not know the temperature reached by other components such as GDDR6X memory and the various stages of the VRM.

The Turemetal UP10 is designed to handle GPUs up to 160W and CPUs up to 140W, so it would appear not to perform badly given the components above its specs, but it must be said that the test has been carried out in a room with a temperature of 13.6 ° C and a humidity of 64%, with the former being clearly incompatible with “human life” (let’s joke, just 13 ° C requires covering, but certainly no one lives in a house at such a temperature). Also, the Ryzen processor was not under load, so if it were called into question, the case would have more difficulty dissipating the heat produced.

Someone on the Internet writes that you could act on the frequencies, TGP and voltage of the card to make it heat less, and it is true, but the results may still not be satisfactory either from a performance or temperature point of view. It is to be taken as an exercise in style (which is very expensive if we think that the case also costs almost 800 dollars), but certainly nothing that we recommend replicating: the world is not yet ready for a passive RTX 3080 (we correct ourselves: given the shortage of cards, the world is not ready for the RTX 3080 in general!).