Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 review - 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... do it at your own risk!
  

The new overclocking features that Nvidia introduced are a bit of a mess. They require a specific driver and the tools available crash more than they work. We went back to the old way, we'll be adding a bit of extra voltage which allows a 1.1V stage, but then the GPU keeps throttling that number down. Very difficult and, if anything, tweaking and overclocking has become more complicated starting with Pascal.

We applied the following settings:

• Temp Target 95 Degrees C
• CPU clock +200 MHz
• Mem clock +500 MHz
• Voltage up-to 1.1v
• FAN RPM 60 %

The Boost clock will now render at roughly 1950~2050 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. In FireStrike we are now hovering at the 2 GHz marker on the Boost frequency for example, but some games jumped to roughly 2.1 GHz one second and dipped below 2 GHz the other.

For all overclocked games above we have used the very same image quality settings as shown before. Overall, the generic thumb of rule here for a decent tweak and overclock is that performance can gain anywhere from 5 to 20% performance. The end result depends on a lot of variables though, including power limiters, temperature limiters, fill-rate and so on, the performance increment can differ per card, brand, heck... even cooling solution and your chassis airflow.