Question Low 3DMark Timespsy / Blender Benchmark scores with 4090 GPU ?

[DeNachtwacht]

Hi, question about a second-hand 4090 Founder's Edition I bought. It's looking good on the outside, no dust etc, but benchmark results are strangely low. I'm wondering what's wrong.

Mainboard: Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570 latest F40d firmware (has PCI-e 4.0 16x support) System: AMD R9 5950X, 64GB DDR4-3200, with Precision Boost Overdrive and Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) enabled in Bios

Software: Windows 11 fully updated and quite a recent fresh system install (2 months old), Founders Edition 4090 firmware also updated,
Blender 4.3

I used 3DMark Timespy Extreme numerous times, and also Blender Benchmark for seperate GPU and CPU reviews. At stock speeds (using 450 Watt while testing) Timespy Extreme 15.5333 (18.326 GPU, 8336 CPU) Blender Benchmark 8500 GPU. (high end 4080 Supers get scores around 8500, the median 4090 score is around 10.900..?)

Using MSI Afterburner and enabling XMP and PBO in the Bios, i managed to tune things up a bit. Afterburner settings: no undervolts, 80% Power Limit, +175 core clock, +1700 memory clock Results now -> power usage 360Watt max. Blender Benchmark GPU: 9500 (better, but still well below average) Blender Benchmark CPU: 387 (15 point above median score) Timespy Extreme: 16424, CPU 9948 and GPU 18557

Compared to other Timespy Extreme 4090 PCs with a R9 5950X gpu, my GPU is in the bottom 17%.

I'm satisfied with average results but this just seems really low. Someone spoke about damaged cuda cores, is that possible? The system works totally fine, no hickups whatso-ever. Temperatures all look normal, the system works flawlessly without any strange behavior. Any advice? Thanks in advance!

 

[Ralston18]

Regarding:

"The system works totally fine, no hickups whatso-ever. Temperatures all look normal, the system works flawlessly without any strange behavior. Any advice?"

Advice:

Leave it all alone. AKA "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

 

[DeNachtwacht]

Thanks for the reply, but the thing is it seems something strange is broken. The GPU performs as a good 4080S, while it’s a 4090. Trying to find out what I could test to see if something could be fixed, that’s all.

 

[Gaidax]

Well, who knows, but are you sure you are actually comparing apples to apples?

Founder Edition cards are both stock clocks, and stock cooling solution. It's not going to be as good as pretty much any 3rd party vendor 4090 card, even at the same clocks, simply because they all have better cooling solutions and thus don't get limited by thermals as much.

Even if you OC - thermal limits are a hard cap there and FE card reaches these faster.

 

[DeNachtwacht]

On the Nvidia forums, someone helped me out with a simple tip. In the Nvidia Control Panel, when owning a 4090, there is a "Change ECC State". This is Error Correcting Code, which is only important when memory faults are really important (enterprise usage). Turned it off, as he suggested... all problems away. Instantly my scores went up from 9600 to 11500 in the Blender Benchmark, same in a few 3DMark benches.

So it indeed was a performance problem, hope this helps someone in the future.

 

[Gaidax]

Okay, that's a cool find.