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 823 MHz core (11% overclock) and 1120 MHz Memory (24% overclock). Even though this overclock may not look as massive it should also be considered that the card comes overclocked out of the box which already represents 10% core overclock.

Compared to other GTX 460 cards, it seems that all GTX 460s hit around the same maximum overclock no matter if overclocked out of the box or reference design. We saw most of our cards reach around 850 MHz, so the AXLE card's 823 MHz are a bit on the low side. On the other hand the memory reaches new records with 1120 MHz where we usually see 1050 to 1090 MHz.

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 10.1%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are low, but fan noise is very audible. Especially in idle there is plenty of headroom to quieten down the fan. Let's hope for a BIOS update from AXLE.

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.