Overclocking

The overclocking results listed in this section were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that 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 here are base clock. Boost will further increase clocks.

Clocks listed here are base clocks; NVIDIA Boost will further increase clocks.



Maximum overclock of our sample is 1190 MHz GPU base clock (12% overclocking) and 1425 MHz memory (14% overclock).

GPU overclocking works well, but is constrained by NVIDIA's power limiter. Once you exceed a certain clock frequency, the card will drop down to base clock to avoid drawing too much power. This happens at different clocks for each card, so you'd have to change your typical overclocking routine. Normally, you'd increase clocks until the card becomes unstable; now, you have to carefully go up in steps, measuring performance every time, to find out where the drop occurs. What makes it even more complicated is that not all games load the card the same, so one game might still boost, while another game drops the card to its base clock.

Memory overclocks surprisingly poorly for chips from Hynix, which usually go well over 1600 MHz.

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 12.8%.