GeForce GTX Titan review

Overclocking the graphics card

As most of you know, with most video cards you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. Typically you can tweak on core clock frequencies and voltages.

What do we need?
One of the best tools for overclocking Nvidia and AMD videocards is our own AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can really recommend it, download here. We used Precision for now though as AB still needed some work at the time of writing this article.

Where should we go?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners, to not increase the frequency any higher than 5% on the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest that you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it.

All in all... do it at your own risk.

EVGA Precision (example screenshot)  - comes with GPU and memory tuning, overvolting, allowing control and adjustment parameters for overclocking.

MSI AfterBurner 3.0.0 (example screenshot)  - comes with GPU and memory tuning, overvolting, allowing control and adjustment parameters for overclocking.

We will have an entire article dedicated to overclocking, but just to get the tastebuds going here's an example.

We applied:

• Power Target 104%
• Priority at Temperature target
• Temp Target 90 Degrees C
• CPU clock +165 MHz
• Mem clock +120 MHz
• Voltage 1200 Mv 

With this overclock we have extra performance at our hands, as the boost clock will now render at 1100~1176 MHz depending on the power and temperature signature. The GPU will continuously be dynamically altered on voltage and clock frequency to match the power and temperature targets versus the increased core clock. Have a peek at the results when overclocked.

Above, Crysis 2, same maxed out image quality settings as before yet now with added overclock results. 

Above, 3DMark 11 - the Performance test and score. As you can see, there is an additional bump in this very GPU limited software, lovely but totally not needed.

And here a run with AVP overclock. In our dedicated overclocking article we'll perform all overclocks at the 3960X platform and pretty much all popular game titles to date.

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