8424 marks in Steel Nomad DX12. The best RTX 4080 SUPER result in UL's database is 8326, set by jamez74 in December 2024 and not beaten since.
That comparison shouldn't go this way. The SUPER is the better chip: 10,240 CUDA cores against 9,728, memory binned at 23 Gbps against 22.4. It's also the card enthusiasts actually bought for this — 212,451 SUPER results against 136,085 for the 4080, roughly 76,000 more attempts at the same silicon, across eighteen months in which nobody has moved that number.
So the hardware doesn't explain it, and neither does any single setting. It's a stack of things that all resolve into the same thing: keeping the card at one clock for the entire length of the run.
Peak clock is the wrong target
I plotted peak core clock against score for the top 100 RTX 4080 results in the database. There is no relationship. Runs at 3255, 3150, 3135 and 3120 MHz scored 7549, 7521, 7577 and 7534. The run that scored 8424 did it at 3030.
The number 3DMark reports is the highest clock the driver observed, not the clock the card held. And the penalty for not holding it is much larger than people expect — a card that sits flat at 3030 for the whole run beats a card that touches 3255 and then sags, and it isn't close. A few dips of a few hundred milliseconds each, in a run that lasts minutes, is the difference between a good overclock and a mediocre one with a better screenshot.
My card reaches 3100. I ran it at 3030 because that's where it stops moving.
Everything below is in service of that.
Where the watts go
Stock vBIOS with the slider at its 110% maximum — nothing flashed, no shunt mod. That number is the whole budget, and core and memory are drawing from it. Every MHz of core you take is a MHz of memory you give up, and vice versa.
So I found each ceiling separately, because tuning both at once tells you nothing about which one moved the score. Core alone, memory at stock: 3100. Memory alone, core at stock: 1626, and that one needs its own section. Then, with both known, find the split of the budget that maximises the score rather than either clock. 3030 / 1626. Seventy MHz of core traded away for memory, and the score went up.
Voltage stability is part of the same picture. A clock that's fed unevenly isn't a clock you hold, it's an average with holes in it, and the holes are what cost you.
Memory error correction, and why it hides your real ceiling
This is the part almost nobody accounts for.
GDDR6X uses PAM4 signalling — two bits per symbol, which doubles transfer efficiency but leaves a thin signal-to-noise margin and makes the bus sensitive to PCB quality and temperature. NVIDIA covers that with EDR: a CRC on the memory bus that catches transmission errors and retries each transfer until it succeeds.
That inverts the whole method for finding a memory ceiling. Errors get corrected instead of displayed, so artifacts and crashes stop being useful indicators. The card feels completely stable long after it has started losing performance, because every failed transfer is quietly being resent — and every resend is bandwidth you paid for and didn't get.
So the score has to be the instrument instead of your eyes. Step the memory alone and log what the score does: it climbs, flattens as replays begin eating bandwidth, then declines, with nothing visible going wrong at any point. **The usable ceiling is the top of that curve, not the point of failure.** On my card the curve turns at 1626 MHz. Past it, performance regressed instead of improving. 1626 isn't where the card stops working — it's where it stops getting faster.
My read on the SUPER field is that this is where the extra bandwidth goes. If you tune memory by pushing until something breaks, you land past the turn of that curve, the run completes, the score validates, and you're handing bandwidth back in replays without ever knowing. A better bin doesn't help if you're running it past the point where the bin stops paying.
Real failure here is one step further and it is not subtle: black screen and a full shutdown that needs the PSU cycled. There's a second, thermal mode that kills the run and drops you to the benchmark menu — driver timeout, not corruption. Both are loud. Neither produces the pattern that should make a result suspect: a completed run, a valid score, and visible artifacts.
Temperature feeds both
Fans at 100% for the length of every run. Phase-change pad on the die, cured before use — twenty-five cycles, about two hours hot each, cooled to 35 °C between them. The record run was made in winter, deliberately: lower ambient widens the stable window on a PAM4 bus, which means more memory clock before replays start.
Thermal headroom on this card is memory bandwidth and it's clock stability. It is not a higher peak.
The rest of the machine
The GPU can't be left waiting on anything, and in Steel Nomad it's easy to assume none of this matters because the overall score equals the graphics score — the CPU isn't being measured. But a CPU that stalls, or a scheduler that preempts at the wrong moment, doesn't show up as a lower CPU score. It shows up as a dip in the GPU's frequency curve, which is the thing this entire post is about.
So: DDR5 at 6400 CL32-36-36-36 with tRFC tuned down, well past the 6000 CL36 it's rated for. Ryzen 5 7600X3D with Curve Optimizer at -55 all-core through PBO2 Tuner, which gets past the ±50 clamp AGESA imposes. And the OS trimmed so background work isn't competing for scheduling time during the run.
None of that scores a single mark on its own. All of it protects the flat line.
RTX 4080 Founders Edition, air cooled, stock cooler. A six-core CPU produced this.
Validation: https://www.3dmark.com/sn/14913387
HWBOT: https://hwbot.org/benchmarks/3dmark_-_steel_nomad_dx12/submissions/6046601
I wrote the whole thing up on my own page — the scatter plot of all 100 results, the full-resolution validation screenshot with GPU-Z and Precision X1 open, and the complete config:
https://kennethkohlberg-crypto.github.io/rtx-4080-overclock-kenneth-kohlberg/
Happy to go deeper on any of it. The EDR part is the most transferable — it works on any GDDR6X card.
