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.



The overclocks of our card are 690 MHz core (6% overclock) and 1230 MHz Memory (7% overclock).

I found it extremely diffificult to reach a stable maximum overclock because the card is held back by its enormous heat output. If you plan on doing some serious overclocking with this card, getting an alternate cooling solution is a must.

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 5.7%.

Temperatures

Heat is the biggest enemy of the ASUS MARS. When running at default clocks the temperature reaches 102°C - already very high. But when overclocked the temps easily go beyond NVIDIA's safety limit of 105°C. At this point all sorts of strange things start happening: performance randomly drops, SLI shuts off randomly until a reboot, the card triggers a shutdown of the system or just hangs.

Since the fan is already running at 100% at default clocks under load, there is no way to increase cooling performance except for adding additional fans blowing onto the card or going water/dice/ln2/he2 cooling.