Overclocking

So I couldn’t help but run the GTX 960 Strix through our overclock testing once I was done with everything else. I was curious if it overclocked as well as the Maxwell GTX 980 did. So what I did is use Asus’s GPU Tweak software to slowly overclock the GPU and Memory individually. After each overclock I would run through test 2 on 3DMark 11 to confirm that things are stable and to give us an average FPS to compare from overclock to overclock. For the GTX 960 Strix we already started with an overclock at 1317MHz for the GPU. I bumped it up to 1400 with good luck and then again to 1500MHz before our driver crashed. From there I knew I was close to the limit, so I just needed to inch my way up. In the end I was able to edge out a 1470MHz. I think I could put it a little more if I dug into voltage a little but I was very happy with this result and it was very stable.

For memory testing I started at 7200MHz and worked my way up 200MHz at a time until I got up into the higher clock speeds. I get a little more nervious with memory overclocks because it seems easier to cause damage and it doesn’t fail as quickly as a bad GPU overclock. Add to that as you can see even with a clock up to 8300MHz we got a total of 1 FPS. Once I finished that I turned both the GPU and Memory up to their highest passing clock speeds to make sure the card could handle both at the same time. The GTX 960 Strix passed without any trouble. In the end we went from an FPS of 49.92 up to 55.06 FPS.