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 most 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 are the highest observed boost clock after overclocking. The same clock increase was applied to all clock levels.



Maximum overclock of our sample is 2002 MHz on the memory (14% overclock), which is artificially limited by the NVIDIA driver. Setting any memory clock higher than 2002 MHz will only result in a memory frequency of 2002 MHz.

GPU overclocking is capped too, at 1911 MHz actual frequency after GPU Boost, but the implementation seems buggy. The actual clock can still be increased even though 1911 MHz is displayed; at beyond 1911 MHz displayed, the card will run at higher performance, and at even higher clocks, it will get increasingly unstable. Maximum overclock of our sample was +189 MHz to the GPU clock, a 14% increase.

Overclocked Performance

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 7.6%.