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 1295 MHz GPU base clock (4% overclock) and 2025 MHz memory (16% overclock). While the GPU clock might look low, especially in comparison to other cards, it is not. Gigabyte has configured their BIOS to have a really high Boost range, which means the card will be running an actual average clock of 1500 MHz out of the box. Our manual overclock was 1550 MHz.

I think I will, from now on, make a point of referring to the maximum Boost clocks for the overclocking comparison to make things easier to compare.

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.

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 11.3%.