Overclocking
Lucky for me we already had a copy of EVGA’s Precision X software when I put the GTX 770 to the test or I wouldn't have had much luck. EVGA has put a lot of time into fine tuning their software over the years to make it simple and easy to use when overclocking or just watching your cards performance. It is so easy in fact that my wife has been using it for some time with her GTX 580 Classified and now for a short period of time with her new GTX 770 ;). It was great to see that it was easy enough for her to jump in and toy around with it while having no experience at all.
Moving on to our overclock testing I took the same approach that I normally would and the same approach that I used on the GTX 770 reference card. I start with testing out GPU clock speeds and then move on to Memory, once I have the best possible speeds I toy around with combining them and see how it all works. I have put together a spreadsheet with my overclocking experience below. To initially test my overclocks I use test 2 on 3DMark 11 set to performance settings, there are more demanding tests out there but I have found this one to be similar to a lot of games in load.
GPU Clock Speed Overclocking |
|||||||
GPU Clock Speed Offset |
Pass/Fail |
Resulting GPU Speed |
FPS Result |
Notes |
|||
103Mhz |
Pass |
1346Mhz |
54.69 |
|
|||
155Mhz |
Fail |
1333Mhz |
N/A |
|
|||
135Mhz |
Fail |
1320Mhz |
N/A |
|
|||
122Mhz |
Fail |
1320Mhz |
N/A |
|
|||
107Mhz |
Fail |
1306Mhz |
N/A |
|
|||
105Mhz |
Pass |
1306Mhz |
55.07 |
|
|||
106Mhz |
Pass |
1306Mhz |
55.07 |
|
|||
107Mhz |
Pass |
1306Mhz |
55.10 |
|
|||
117MhZ |
Pass |
1306Mhz |
55.04 |
|
|||
117Mhz |
Fail |
1306Mhz |
N/A |
Added voltage |
|||
|
|||||||
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking |
|||||||
Memory Clock Speed Offset |
Pass/Fail |
Resulting Memory Speed |
FPS Result |
Notes |
|||
400Mhz |
Pass |
3903Mhz |
51.63 |
|
|||
500Mhz |
Pass |
4001Mhz |
51.73 |
|
|||
550Mhz |
Pass |
4059Mhz |
51.76 |
|
|||
575MhZ |
Pass |
4082Mhz |
51.80 |
1 Artifact |
|||
600MhZ |
Pass |
4104Mhz |
51.81 |
1 Artifact |
|||
625Mhz |
Pass |
4131Mhz |
51.83 |
30+ Artifacts |
|||
|
|||||||
Combined GPU and Memory overclocks together |
|||||||
GPU Offset |
Memory Offset |
Pass Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
|||
117MHZ |
600MHz |
Pass |
55.92 |
5 Artifacts |
|||
This time around the GTX 770 acted a little more erratic when overclocking the GPU. A good example of this was adding voltage to a known good clock killing it. When you figure in the overclock on this card already my results were fairly close though, the reference card was able to do 1320Mhz while this card hit 1306Mhz and wouldn't go a click over it. On the memory side of things I was once again very impressed with the clocks I was able to get with this card. I even pulled a little more than I could on the reference design. I settled on the same 4104Mhz or 8208Mhz effective clock speed on both the reference and EVGA cards but I found the EVGA card to be much more stable at that clock, this might be related to its additional cooling.