New 450W BIOS for the EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra could potentially take Ampere to new performance heights

EVGA recently announced a new beta BIOS update for its GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra graphics card, promising a 450W TDP, 130W higher than the stock GeForce RTX 3080. The substantially higher power limit should (theoretically) help the card hit and sustain substantially higher boost clocks in-game, 

The new BIOS comes weeks after reviews, and user experience consistently highlighted the trivial amount of overclocking headroom on most NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards. As a matter of fact, some AIB GeForce RTX 3080s experienced instability when running at stock, prompting NVIDIA to issue a driver update that slightly lowered average boost clocks. 

It remains to be seen just how much of a performance uplift EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra users can expect from the beta BIOS. On the one hand, NVIDIA's GPU Boost algorithm does limit clockspeeds on the basis of power consumption. Raising the power limit as high as it goes on RTX 3080 cards has a tangible impact on performance.

On the other hand, though, if the silicon is being pushed hard as it is (which the earlier instability issue implies), a higher power limit might not do much for performance overhead under standard operating conditions. We'll have to wait and see how benchmark figures turn out with the new BIOS. 

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