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 923 MHz core (6% overclock) and 1110 MHz Memory (11% overclock). That's a solid overclocking potential, and shows that given its category, the GTS 450 is overclocker-friendly, letting you squeeze the last ounce of performance out of this affordable SKU. Do also bear in mind, that when compared to the reference design, the card is giving us 18% core and 23% memory overclock. The memory overclocking potential is particularly surprising considering NVIDIA's GDDR5 memory clock speeds and overclocking potential have been on the lower side.

ZOTAC's card also uses faster memory chips (1250 MHz vs. 1000 MHz), but this can't make any difference in our testing, which suggests that the GPU memory controller is limiting the memory speed, not the memory chips.

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 6.1%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are sufficiently low, so is fan noise - a winning combination.

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.