EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW2 review

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Overclocking The Graphics Card

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. 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 can really 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 25 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... you always overclock at your own risk!
 

 
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Original This sample Overclocked 
Core Clock: 1607 MHz Core Clock: 1721 MHz Core Clock: 1829 MHz
Boost Clock: 1733 MHz Boost Clock: 1860MHz Max Boost Clock: 2050~2100
Memory Clock: 10010 MHz Memory Clock: 10010 MHz Memory Clock: 11124MHz

You can use any tweaking utility of your preference of course. We use AfterBurner based on personal preference, all other brands like ASUS, Gigabyte and thus EVGA all have nice tweaking software available as well, it's just that advanced overlay and tweak functionality that AB offers has my personal preference. Our applied tweak:

  • Core Voltage : +100%
  • Power Limit : 120%
  • Temp. limit : 92C 
  • Core Clock : + 110
  • Memory Clock : +560 MHz (=11124 effective data-rate)
  • FAN RPM: 50%

Not bad. More Voltage 100% offset applied was stable. Memory as well, we noticed some 'dot' artifacting at 600 MHz under a stress run, 560 (x2 DDR rate) thus 1.1 GHz was the maximum. Once overclocked keep this in mind: Due to the dynamic nature of the boost clock, your frequency is not fixed. Limiters and monitors, temperature, load, power and voltages will continuously alter a maximum clock state. With this overclock and with that 120% power limiter the card is only slightly more audible at ~43 Dba (you can hear on a moderate level) but at improved thermals at roughly 70 Degrees C. 

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Above relative performance difference in between a reference card, the AIB card with its respective applied tweak and our overclocked results plotted in percentage. The reference card is 100%. To the far right where you can see Aver Difference %, this is the result of the four games tested and averaged out. So the card runs give or take 7% faster compared to reference. And once we teak it manually it is roughly 13% faster compared to the reference card and thus 6% faster compared to the default EVGA FTW2 clocks. This was with the TDP Power limiter tweak maxed out. Below all overclock results, measured at WQHD. 

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