Overclocking

It's been ages since I'd done any overclocking on an NVIDA based video card. ATI has no doubt dominated over the last few months and really, over the last few months 99% of the video card reviews have been based on ATI chipsets. That's going to change, though, as we see partners release versions of the GTX 400 series over the coming months. We're sure that ATI aren't just going to sit still, however.

When it came to overclocking options, as you would expect options are pretty limited for a model that hasn't even been released yet. Fortunately, the boys at EVGA gave us the hook up with the latest version of Precision which is their own branded overclocking tool.

Firing up the tool, we instantly felt some sadness due to the lack of the ability to overclock the core. Maybe because the card does run quite warm, NVIDIA didn't want to give us the option. It wasn't going to stop us from overclocking at all, though.

With great surprise, once we started to overclock the Shader clock, the Core clock moved with it. Even though we couldn't see it in EVGA Precision, it could clearly be seen under GPU-Z.....and our benchmarks!

As you can see, we moved from a 607MHz core clock to 687MHz. The Shader went from 1215MHz to 1374MHz and as for the 1280MB of GDDR5, we got that from 837MHz to 980MHz which in QDR land equates to a jump from 3348MHz QDR to 3920MHz QDR.

I managed to tip over the 4GHz QDR mark once or twice, but it didn't want to play all that nice. What we ended up with is still very impressive and should yield some noticeable performance gains.