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 1880 MHz on the memory (25% overclock) and +160 MHz to the GPU's base clock, which increases average GPU clock from 1916 MHz to 2002 MHz (5% overclock).

What's worth mentioning about the comparatively low GPU overclock is that the Ventus can handle 2040 MHz fine, just like the other cards. The problem is that the board power limit is so low with 120 W that the card will clock down heavily to stay within this limit, especially when the large memory overclock is applied.

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 10.3%.