Upgrading to a 3080ti, finally

I've been patiently waiting 2 years to upgrade after refusing the lackluster 2080ti upgrade.  After 10 months of grumbling, entering Newegg shuffles and exhausting vendor sites, I finally held my very own EVGA 3080ti FTW Ultra in my tingling paws. In the rarest of GPU purchase phenomena these days, I actually had a 23% discount to buy MSRP. I won 20% coupon spinning the prize wheel for becoming an EVGA Elite member.  At the time, I thought it was some one week promo for peripherals for an RGB mouse or PSU, not a $300 discount on almost the GPU of my dreams.  I paid around $1200 for the MSRP of $1399 excluding 9.25% CA tax. 

All year, I've been debating the wisdom of paying so much for a GPU. Compared to the 3080 MSRP for $800, this factory overclocked 3080ti $1399 is a terrible deal yielding barely 10% in gaming performance for 75+%  cost. But that 3080 $800 MSRP is tots imaginary and I was entirely grateful for overpay a moderate amount to a legitimate vendor.  I said to myself, "What a steal!" as this model had been reselling for ~$2500 on ebay and Amazon.  Also EVGA has something no other AIB partner has - a golden 10 year extended warranty for $60 so I'm going to use this card way past where it dies a natural death.

How did I even get one? 2 weeks ago the morning of the 3080ti launch, I woke up at 5:45am and pushed F5 hundreds of times for 2 hours on the overloaded EVGA site.   And despite the grumpy grumps on reddit who said we would have to wait in the queue until winter, here it is.

All morning I giggled like a school girl giddy with excitement that the thing I desired most all year actually was in my paws.   The LED is set to display 3 zone thermals for GPU, memory and power with blue being the safe idle temp under 50C. If you recognize the flesh colored sandwich, you will know I value functionality over vanity. Noctua forever!

What is the biggest buzzkill for a new GPU owner? The honeymoon didn't last but first let's cover the good.

The raw compute power is more than adequate for my gaming. 4K Witcher with Ultra everything settings looks amazing. I guess I could have played those settings on the 1080ti at 30-45fps. I was trotting around in the Blood and Wine DLC and the floriferous scenery and excessive grass really does me right. Of course I turned on Hair Physics to see that grey ponytail bounce.

The Bad, Thermals...

 I knew prior to purchase the 30 series ran hotter than any GPUs prior with the GDDR6 particularly prone to overheating.  But actually seeing parts of the card go above 90C even if it's within spec made me uncomfortable.  At first I was trying various other configuration means with under volting and more aggressive fan curves.  Even more worrying was heat dissipation for all surrounding components.  The RAM, SSD, HDDs surrounding the card definitely ran 5-10C hotter.

Some on reddit had replaced the air cooler with an AIO cooler and had recommended me the same. One fellow said he saw 10C improvement if that. But the solution was far simpler and easier.

I opened up the front of my case and vacuumed up the dust bunnies and temps were magically under control with the GPU under 72C but the memory max higher at 82C and hotspot being 77C when running 3DMark tests. My games normally don't run that hot and I could clamp down power to 80%, run even yet cooler and see no game performance difference since my 4K monitor could do no more than 60Hz. 

The Disappointing

My  main impetus to upgrade was to be able to upgrade my OG Vive to a nextgen headset.   The 3080ti definitely alleviated some performance problems for Fallout VR. But heavily modded Bethesda games can be CPU bound that you cannot pay your way out of with a beefy GPU. I was still suffering the same low rates in heavy NPC areas(Goodneighbor, Riften), at least I was doing it in higher resolution. 200% SS definitely is clearer and better looking than 150%. 

I put Alyx on ultra(from high) and didn't notice a significant visual improvement. Valve has done an extraordinary job making Alyx look amazing even with the 1080ti. Same with RDR2 that they have managed this game to look good at almost any setting. 4K ultra didn't necessarily look that amazing to my previous settings. But when I first played RDR2 on a PS4, I was constantly amazed at how good it looked even back then at fake 4K.

Trying out RTX

Cyberpunk 2077 - RTX looked incredibly realistic but it doesn't make me want to play this game anymore. I don't think I would have enjoyed this game any more or less with RTX.  It takes more than shiny reflections to make me love a game.

I only have 3 games in my library that support RTX (Control, Metro Exodus, CP2077) and the added benefit of RTX doesn't make me want to play them any more or less. 

End Thoughts

After pining away for a new GPU since last September, I am on the fence. I am some days giddy with joy being able to play ultra 4K. Other days I think to myself this is just a GPU. Why was I so hot and bothered for so long...

GTX 1080ti with eGPU A Waste of $1000

After finally getting my grubby little paws on a GTX 1080ti,  I was sorely sorely disappointed I had set myself up so hard.  When you plunk down a sizeable outlay of gold for just a GPU, you really have to ask yourself honestly, how much more enjoyment will you reap on a speedier GPU. And the answer now I surprise myself with is "not that much more".  Considering that I now spend most of my precious gaming time on a PS4 with Red Dead Redemption 2, I guess my gaming life would have been just as rich had I stuck with my serviceable GTX 1070.  I upgraded in preparation for the Pimax 5K+, but I realize the OG Vive is still lots of fun. But really, I ain't got no time to be under a helmet when RDR2 is so fabulous.

  

SkyrimVR is unstable as before- crashing in 30 min intervals. Still can't have Apachii Divine Elegance Store, no bikini armor- can't have anything nice...  (Actually I don't approve of bikini armors but I'd like to have these mods ready in case male friends visit and want to see the full charm of modded Skyrim.)  But my SkyrimVR problems are not GPU related- it must be the aging Bethesda engine not meant to run 200+ mods despite having 11GB vRAM.  It falls over even before it reaches 9GB use.  Probably I need a clean character build but after 300 hours of grind, I loathe the thought of starting over.

Yes I can run with much higher 2x SS settings. I can run ENBs now but this is not reason enough for $1000. Stuff looks somewhat better than a 1070(though the Vive Gear VR lens swap made the biggest difference in clarity), but I realize I was utterly enraptured with the magical fantasy world of SkyrimVR even before this upgrade.

Kingdom Come Deliverance definitely needed the extra horse power to run 4K, otherwise the stuttering really ate into immersion. But playing at 1080p was still enjoyable.  4K Witcher 3 runs amazing with 1080ti, but I was still amazed even with lower fps.  My $1000 lesson is that raw GPU speed may not take your enjoyment that much further because it's engaging game play and not the most hyper realistic detail that will win your imagination. I grew up on 8 bit games, even text based ASCII RPG games which were strangely thrilling. And now that I've been completely absorbed in Red Dead Redemption on a dinky PS4(1.84 Teraflops) while  my 1080ti(11.3 Teraflops) dusts away, I happily realize I have no need to upgrade to an RTX.

From a technical point of view,  I am still impressed you can run a laptop with an external GPU. Probably the best part of this upgrade is keeping the core laptop motherboard cool.

GPU Upgrade: Agonizing over RTX 2080ti vs 1080ti

TLDR- Alienware AGA with EVGA 1080ti SC2(with EVGA open option to upgrade in 3 months)

In the fall of 2016, I treated myself to a new Alienware 17 R4 with a GTX 1070 after limping along a few months with my HTC Vive on a subpar GPU.  This R4 has been a champ for most VR games in the last two years until I started modding SkyrimVR heavily.  I don't need buttery performance on pancake 4k games-   I enjoy amazing artistry and story telling so much on the Witcher 3 I haven't actually noticed the suboptimal fps.  However low frame rates and reprojection in a high-action VR game is not just a buzz kill- the ensuing nausea kills the session and queasiness lingers enough to avoid VR for days.  Also I spend hours agonizing over my load list and cutting mods when I want to try out new mods.

I could cut out all those greedy Skyrim mods- who needs realistic rope and individual straws in hay bales anyways or... Or I could get on the treadmill of nextgen hardware upgrades. With Pimax 8K headsets coming up and with the sale of new RTX gpus,  I had sweet sweet visions of prancing around Skyrim with 200 degree FOV in second generation VR gear.

One ponders heavily the wisdom of spending thousands to get realistic immersive virtual grass.  Gamers are often in a spectrum of spend guilt. I personally am a huge believer in video games as a positive force for growth and development.  I had some dubious mental calculation about never having wasting money on cable TV- this must have saved at least $10K in the last 10 years.  I also had dutifully saved up some septims to buy the Vive Pro which just didn't seem worth the effort.

My decision tree went something like this.
1. I need more VRAM(because 4K environment textures DO make a difference) and that would only be GTX 1080ti or RTX 2080ti with 11GB over the standard 8GB.
2. A bigger fork deciding over a brand new spanking desktop or use a external gpu on my Alienware R7.

New Box or eGPU?
My hard working husband(so sweet guy) who knows how much I love marveling in a VR fantasy world has offered to buy me a top of the line Alienware Area 51 with the RTX of choice. Area 51 currently comes with with an RTX 2080 OC (overclocked mode) with the 2080ti probably coming out later in the year when the supply of 2080ti increases.  The only reason I stick by Dell and Alienware instead of building a custom rig is for the 5 year support plan since these beast gaming machines are more prone to failure.  I've only had to replace the motherboard once in the last 2 years.

Alienware AGA vs Thunderbolt eGPU
It was time to call in the AGA(Alienware Graphics Amplifier) option.  AGA hands down is faster than thunderbolt 3 since has direct dedicated connection to the motherboard unlike the thunderbolt 3 which has to share the PCIe switch.

RTX 2080ti vs GTX 1080ti
Obviously if money was not an issue and one could get your hands on a RTX 2080ti, you would spare your brain cells of the excruciating price to enjoyment analysis.  Although such funds are ample in my piggy bank, I totally frown on paying the "must have latest greatest gpu" premium charged in the first months of a gpu's initial release.   On getting a 2080ti, I don't believe my future enjoyment of future games will have that much to do with ray tracing or DLSS.

If I think of the most amazing games I have ever played in the last 10 years and some of them not even 3D like Samarost 3, hardware ray tracing in no way would enhance these games.   But also triple AAA publishers- those who have the budget to potentially take advantage of the RTX, may not take the risk in something so proprietary for NVidia that requires such expensive gpus.  Game companies have to sell to the widest audience - that includes consoles which have no hope of hardware ray tracing in the next few years.  The GTX 1080ti which is still almost ~50%  better than my 1070 but may be barely adequate for a Pimax. There is the overhead loss of course of 10-15% in not directly plugging into the motherboard but 1080ti upgrade seemed a good compromise.

(Update- at launch, it wasn't exactly clear what DLSS was and finding out about it, it's even worse than I thought and totally useless for most of the games out.  The game developers have to send in "data" to Nvidia to have them crunch the data through hyper expensive NVIDIA's DGX SaturnV supercomputing cluster to build a learning model.  DLSS demos really show subpar results esp. with images having text- not great for VR.   Games I play- heavily modded games, older titles, and indy games- will never have RTX version of DLSS nor could it.  DLSS is misleading since it's upscaling from 1080p. DLSS2 is running 4k native. Not clear how it would impact VR games since none has been modified and foveated rendering is a better solution. )

Proprietary Alienware Graphics Amplifier vs Thunderbolt eGPU
No brainer to get the proprietary Alienware AGA external gpu chassis  over a Thunderbolt eGPU. The AGA has separate dedicated bus on the Alienware R4 instead of the Thunderbolt which would share the PCI lanes including network. Plus the AGA was on sale for $159 on Dell.

MSI vs Gigabyte vs EGVA- form factor, thermals, noise, etc...
Even when one decides on a gpu, you still have to go through the gauntlet of graphics board selection.  MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA were the 3 aftermarket manufacturers I considered due to their improved cooling systems. There is the problem with form factor as the AGA chassis allows for only 2 slot cards and MSI/Gigabyte had 2.5 slots. I read on the board the 2.5 slot cards do fit but you cannot fully close the top and I didn't want my board being prey to dust. 

The clincher was EVGA's upgrade program so if I wanted to jump to a 2080ti in the next 3 months, I still had the happy option to plunk down an extra $500 to do so.

Which EVGA 1080ti Model: SC2 vs FTW3?
Even when you chose EVGA 1080ti, you still have the final and last gauntlet of model options, FTW3 SC, SC2, Black Edition GAMING, SC2 Hybrid...  careful weighing of cooling options ICX Cooling vs ICX Technology, 2 fan vs 3 fan. I opted for ICX SC2 Gaming which had the 2 fan smaller form factor but still the 9 temp sensors and asynchronous fans.  You can see gamer nexus deep breakdown here:

• https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2900-evga-1080-ti-ftw3-review-vs-sc2-gaming-x-xtreme-aorus/page-3

Who to Buy from: Amazon vs Newegg
The final hurdle- where to buy this EVGA 1080ti SC2 Gaming. I looked on Amazon and one of the reviewers said be weary of used cards in crypto mining that had been returned and repackaged. I decided to buy it from a place with a stringent GPU return policy so I bought it non-refundable directly from newegg(and not an affiliate vendor).