Overclocking
Overclocking results listed in this section are achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. We choose this approach as it is the most realistic scenario for the majority of users.
Every sample overclocks differently, which is why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.
On NVIDIA cards with Boost, the values discussed here are base clock. Boost will further increase clocks. Boost is already factored into our resulting clocks for AMD cards because of the way their technology works.
Maximum overclock of our sample is 1290 MHz GPU base clock (16% overclock) and 1990 MHz memory (14% overclock).
GPU overclocking works very well, but EVGA's card overclocks slightly better, although the difference is small and within random variation. Memory overclock almost breaches the magical 2 GHz barrier because of the well-clocking Samsung memory chips used.
Maximum Overclock Comparison |
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| Max. GPU Clock | Max. Memory Clock |
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ASUS GTX 970 STRIX OC | 1290 MHz | 1990 MHz |
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EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX | 1315 MHz | 2010 MHz |
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Palit GTX 970 JetStream | 1230 MHz | 1940 MHz |
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NVIDIA GTX 980 | 1350 MHz | 1970 MHz |
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Important: Each GPU (including each GPU of the same make and model) will overclock slightly
differently based on random production variances. This table just serves to provide a list of typical
overclocks for similar cards, determined during TPU review.
Using these clock frequencies, we ran a quick test of
Battlefield 3 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.
Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 12.3%.