How to stop power limit throttling on Gainward RTX 5080?
Facing down thousands of Tyranids, my frame rate just fell off a cliff—it was an absolutely garbage experience. The Gainward RTX 5080 Storm OC was hitting 450W peaks under extreme load, triggering a hardware-level power wall that crashed the core clock from 2500MHz down to 1800MHz, causing obvious stutters. My first move was using MSI Afterburner to force the power limit higher, but the card shot up to 85℃ and the fans sounded like a helicopter taking off—basically a suicide mission for my ears. I pivoted and did the opposite: I manually dropped the power limit to 90% and paired it with an aggressive custom fan curve, forcing 80% speed between 60-80℃. In HWInfo, the clock fluctuations narrowed from 1800-2500MHz to a stable 2300-2400MHz. I lost a tiny bit of peak performance, but the minimum frames improved massively. I actually crashed the game a few times by setting a negative voltage offset by mistake, but it's stable now at default voltage. VRAM is 78-84℃ and core is 68-74℃. Exported the config and now the response is finally snappy.
