Overclocking

Before overclocking, I did a quick test to check on how the cooler of the Titan X 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 to about 1550 MHz. They do stabilize later at what seems to be a point at which Boost 3.0 detects stable conditions.

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. For this review I've applied the same clock increase to all clock levels.



Maximum overclock of our sample is +232 MHz to the GPU's base clock, which increases max Boost from 1835 MHz to 2063 MHz (12% overclock), and 1405 MHz on the memory (12% overclock).

The Titan X is definitely limited by the board's power limit and temperatures going above 83°C, which will both result in lower clocks due to NVIDIA Boost. Still, the real-life performance gains are there and are significant - take a look below.

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 7.9%.

As additional datapoints, I've set the power limit and temperature target to their maximum and fan speed to 100%. This yields 7% extra performance at even stock clocks. With the overclock active, the OC gains 11% from that, which brings the total performance gained after overclocking to 19.3% !