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 1230 MHz GPU base clock (16% overclock) and 1940 MHz memory (14% overclock).
MSI's card shows awesome overclocking potential, well beyond the reference sample from NVIDIA we received for our launch review. Memory overclocking leaves the 2 GHz barrier in the dust and tops out at 2050 MHz - higher than any other graphics card I've ever reviewed.
Maximum Overclock Comparison |
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| Max. GPU Clock | Max. Memory Clock |
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MSI GTX 980 Gaming | 1380 MHz | 2050 MHz |
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ASUS GTX 980 STRIX | 1390 MHz | 1930 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 14.6%.