Time to
overclock monitor or even some overclocking of the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition and
running the tests again to see what hashrate increase can we expect from the GPU with the increased operating frequencies. The Founders Edition cards are somewhat limited in the max power you can get by the presence of only one 8-pin PCI-E power, default TDP limit of 180W and a Power Limiter that allows for just 20% increase over the default TDP (216W max TDP). We already know that the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs are handling quite well overclocking and you can squeeze a lot more from them if you are not limited and don’t care than much
about the power usage. Unfortunately for some more serious overclocking you will have to wait for the GTX 1080 cards that come with custom cooling solutions form Nvidia’s partners that will allow for more serious overclocking. Meanwhile we are pushing the GTX 1080 Founders Edition to what it can do without touching the core voltage and doing some benchmarks with: Power Limit + 20%, Core Clock + 240 MHs, Memory Clock + 125 MHs, the max settings that are running stable for 24/7 mining on our test card and the results are below.
As you can see from the table of hashrate results with the stock settings and the overclocked GTX 1080 the average performance increase we are getting is about 12%. A result that is not bad, but a more serious overclock can help us get even more hashrate from the GPU, unfortunately making it less attractive in terms of hashrate per watt. The problem with low performance for Neoscrypt and not that great for Lyra2RE still remain and unlike with Ethereum where we see some, though not enough,
performance boost testing under Windows 10, with these two algorithms Windows 10 does not help, so they really need GPU specific optimizations to max out performance unlike the other algos that already scale pretty well on the GTX 1080. Other algorithms also do not show any significant difference in results between Windows 7 and Windows 10, so no need to upgrade or downgrade your OS. Of course for Ethereum mining on GTX 1080 or GTX 1070 you would still need to go for Linux for the best possible performance as still Windows hashrate is not satisfactory at all.
