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 620 MHz core (13% overclock) and 1960 MHz Memory (9% overclock). Getting this much overclock out of the card was quite difficult. When applying a normal method of changing 3D clocks only and then testing if the card is stable I could barely overclock core/shaders by 20 MHz. Then the card would jump into some kind of safety mode which forces 2D Low Power clocks all the time. To get out of this mode you need to reboot, which can be a quite frustrating waste of time when searching for a maximum overclock. In order to reduce the amount of time spent to find the max OC I forced the clocks I wanted to test on both the 2D Low Power and 3D profile. Surprisingly the card stopped crashing/mode changing and simply went on to run fine.

The overclock listed here is the stable clock achieved when both 2D Low Power and 3D are set to the same clock. When overclocking only 3D, expect a substantially lower overclock (at least on our sample). Please also consider the implication this has for power management.

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 12.9%.

Temperatures

Temperatures look excellent. Even with overclocking the temperature is comfortably cool. Unfortunately the price that you have to pay for the low temperatures is the extremely noisy fan which always spins at the same speed, no matter how cool the card is.