Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.


Due to a bug in GPU-Z the shaders are reported incorrectly as 224, the correct number is 336.

The overclocks of our card are 848 MHz core (16% overclock) and 1105 MHz Memory (23% overclock). Very nice results here. We have seen core overclocks well over 800 MHz from all the GTX 460 cards that we reviewed today. First this means that it is easy to catapult this card into new performance regions with a few clicks and it also means that NVIDIA's production process is working well, opening up the possibility of future higher clocked versions of the GF104 GPU on faster cards.

Since MSI's card is already overclocked out of the box the increase in clocks is smaller, the maximum clock reached is similar to non-overclocked cards. MSI's cooler seems to handle memory overclocking a bit better than the reference design cooler, which results in a higher maximum memory overclock, but not by a big margin.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 16.6%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are comfortably low, in my opinion it would make more sense to trade a little bit of temperature for reduced fan noise so that the card's noise levels match at least these of the NVIDIA reference design.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for major performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.