Overclocking GeForce GTX 470 with extra GPU voltage - Final words & conclusion

The Verdict

Much like the GTX 480 OC review, please make no mistake, what we have shown you here today is not really something we can recommend with the generic (reference based air-cooled) GeForce GTX 470 unless you want to fool and play around a little of course.

To compensate the additional voltage and thus additional heat coming from the GPU you'll need to increase the fan rotation of the graphics card which on its end increases the noise levels of the cooler coming from already loud to really unheard proportions. This article serves merely of an indication what the GeForce GTX 470 has in store for overclocking potential.

That said, we definitely liked what we have seen. But again under reference cooled conditions this is not something you should be pursuing at all unless you want to have some fun of course. No we are hinting at future custom cooled cards and obviously, the liquid cooled version of these cards.

Giving the card a little more voltage brought it to 775MHz on the core, nearing in on 1550 MHz in the shaders. So that fact by itself is promising considering we came from a 600 MHz core / 1200 MHz shader base frequency.

The result of this is that you can squeeze another 15% performance out of the product. Memory wise things clearly are  more complex. For whatever reason whenever we went above another 50 MHz on the memory frequency we noticed the card clocking back after a while of stressing the card firmly, a bit of a shame.

With what we've shown today we see 15% performance increases on what is already really fast graphics card. Obviously the liquid cooling crowd is going to really like a little voltage tweaking.

The new MSI Afterburner will be ready for downloading tomorrow, Monday the 19th of April.

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