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 970 MHz core (11% overclock) and 1420 MHz Memory (18% overclock). I am very satisfied with these overclocking results, they are both quite good. Since MSI is promoting their voltage adjustment features with this card I also tried to manually adjust the voltage up to the voltage regulator's maximum of 1.35V. At 1.2V I got 970 MHz max. core clock, 1.25V: 980 MHz, 1.30V: 1000 MHz, 1.35V: 1020 MHz.

According to MSI I got a bit unlucky with my sample card, they have seen 1020 MHz at 1.20V.

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 10.5%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are very low and there is very little fan noise. This shows that MSI has made a great choice with their cooling solution - and also used proper fan settings in the BIOS.

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.