GFX card power limiting

So...

Have a stock 2080ti not overclocked, had a 600W Cooler master PS (realistically rated to a max of 700W per some really detailed testing). Using MSI afterburner I saw that periodically it was hitting the watt limit. Not a big deal didn't really effect performance, but I wanted to make sure I had "room". Got an CM 850W Gold PS, put it in and if anything I'd say its doing it more. Typical GPU usage is in the 70-80% range too, so I'm a bit baffled. I have heard there might be some BIOS settings that might effect this but haven't explored further. Using an ASROC Z390 pro4 mobo.

Any thoughts?

nVidia limit the power draw of their graphics cards by setting a TDP limit. RTX 2080 Ti in particular clock so fast that the limiting factor on their performance is usually not their bus speed, but their power draw hitting the limits set by nVidia in GPU BIOS. (Either that or Voltage limits). With a GPU OEM manufacturer software utility like MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X1, you can overclock the GPU using a simple slider to increase the TDP limit from 100% to something higher. The limit allowed by the software utility will now be an OC TDP limit decided by the OEM of your graphics card and depends on the voltage phases of your card. Higher end cards like Kingpins and Hall of Fame have higher OC TDP limits. My mid / low end card allows 130% for example. My suggestion: play around with OCing your GPU. It is easy and the settings will not allow you to brick your GPU. Listen to an OC video by one of the Youtubers. Jayz2Cents is usually okay for this kind of stuff.

Regardless, you were wise to upgrade from a 600W to 850W PSU on your system. (You have a powerful rig there with 9700K and RTX 2080 Ti).

Harlikwin something you can try if you don't want to touch anything from the safe locked parameters is to put your gpu fans to max. It will be noisy but gpu will run cooler. This way it will need less voltage for same load and so will consume less wattage. It might suffice to not hit power limit.

But if you want, without overclocking further the gpu (that must already being factory overclocked if it's not a founder's edition but a custom gpu), taking the best out of it, you should touch these parameters, like Milou said, and unlock Power limit, voltage (it's ok, the gpu will only take more if needed and always below hardware limit), and put cooler to max when above 60°c or even lower (I've set a curve with 100% fan when gpu comes to 60°c on mine).

But nvidia and also MSI (afterburner) of course disclaim any responsability bla bla bla .

Thanks guys I'll look into. It is a stock Nvidia 2080ti FE card. Temp wise it doesn't get much above 70C I think the highest I've seen is 74 and its "capped" at 88C or something. I've never seen it thermally throttle, buy power/voltage it does seem to do it (I can't really tell in game though). Most of the time its running 70-80% GPU utilization with the occasional spikes above that.

if you dont UP the voltage it's very safe. The powerlimit aka wattage doesnt really hurt the card unless it overheats or runs a borderline temp. Use it's fans and case fans too to give it sufficient cooling.

Even if you up the volts, the card wouldnt suffer a lot if cooling is ample. It's lifespan may reduce by a small margin but usually well outside of our envelope I'd say.

As long as you dont ALSO increase any MHz, more allowed voltage and wattage only strengthens the card to MAINTAIN its default clocks, even when the GPU has to crunsh some hard numbers for a few seconds. That's how I see and handle it myself.

The temps are the A&O for a GPU.