Overclocking

Before overclocking, I did a quick test to check on how the cooler of the GTX 1080 Ti handles the heat and what happens with the clocks.



As you can see, clocks start dropping immediately (as introduced with Boost 3.0) and keep going down as temperature increases, bottoming out at around 1650 MHz, which is still 170 MHz higher than base clock, meaning that the card has some headroom left to run Boost. Overall, these results are very similar to those of the GTX Titan X.

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 1520 MHz on the memory (10% overclock) and +177 MHz to the GPU's base clock, which increases maximum Boost from 1866 MHz to 2063 MHz (11% overclock).

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 10.2%.

Since the card runs into its power limit and does throttle due to high temperatures, I set the power target to max (120%), temperature target to max (90°C), and fan speed to 100%, which resembles a highly optimized custom-design or watercooled Founders Edition. These changes provide an additional 5% performance improvement over the baseline, which is quite significant.