Afterburner Finds More Fuel
The FPS Review’s foray into overclocking the RTX 5080 FE proves that Afterburner survived the concerns raised by the end of the relationship between MSI and Afterburner’s main developer. They were able to use the newest version of Afterburner to up the power limit on their RTX 5080 FE as well as the GPU and memory clocks. One thing they realized immediately was that the RTX 5080 FE power limit slider tops out at 8% above the 100% default, while many OEM cards, including one from MSI, topped out at a 11% boost. That suggests if you are intending on overclocking you might want to pay a bit extra for a non-FE version.
The FPS Review put some work into overclocking and found the limit for stable performance to be 3124MHz GPU and 31Gbps memory, or a 12.6% boost on GPU and 3% memory. This translated into an average ~8% boost in performance which is nowhere near enough to make the RTX 5080 FE competitive with the RTX 4090 but certainly helps the card when compared to the RTX 4080 SUPER.
Check the full results here.