Overclocking

Manual overclocking has once more become more complicated with this generation. Since the cards are always running in the power limiter, you can no longer just dial-in stable clocks for the highest boost state to find the maximum overclock. The biggest issue is that you can't just reach that state reliably, so your testing is limited to whatever frequency your test load is running at (which usually changes all the time). That's why we're changing how we report overclocked GPU frequencies. Instead of listing the highest clock (that's only active for a short moment), we measure average GPU clock over a longer time period and report that value—which represents real-life experience much better.

With manual overclocking, maximum overclock of our sample is 1650 MHz on the memory (10% overclock) and +200 MHz to the GPU's base clock, which increases average GPU clock from 1836 MHz to 1945 MHz (6% overclock).

Overclocking didn't work well on the Zotac card. Once we exceeded certain clocks, the card would crash immediately. We're checking with Zotac to see if they know why this is happening.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies, we ran a quick test of Unigine Heaven to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 9.2%.