Overclocking

I’ll be honest, with a factory overclock already combined with the cooling limitations that the smaller form factor gives you I wasn’t all that confident that I would be able to push the DirectCU Mini all that hard. I pressed on and put it through our standard benchmarking suite that consists of breaking down the overclock by core clock and memory, pushing their limits, and then testing them in test 2 of 3DMark 11 on performance settings. I started with GPU core clock overclocking and as you can see in my documentation below the results weren’t as bad as I expected but still not as high as I think I could have gotten with additional cooling. Even so, a clock speed of 1359MHz is still very impressive! When I moved on to memory overclocking I was able to push the limit much farther, to the point where I got worried that I was going to damage the card. In the end I was able to run a 700MHz memory clock offset without experiencing any issues. Lastly I put the two together and ran them to see if they would run. Oddly enough they passed the first time through but the second time I didn’t have as good of luck, even with a slightly lower memory clock. This was most likely due to temperatures, had I let the card cool all the way down it would have been okay. If I were to overclock the card day to day though, I would be looking to take a noticeable drop from these numbers for reliability.

GPU Clock Speed Overclocking

GPU Clock Speed Offset

Pass/Fail

Resulting GPU Speed

FPS Result

Notes

100MHz

Pass

1228MHz

44.69

 

200MHz

Pass

1267MHz

47.21

 

250MHz

Pass

1359MHz

48.65

 

300MHz

Fail

1424MHz

N/A

Driver and 3DMark Crash

275MHz

Fail

1411MHz

N/A

Driver and 3DMark Crash

260MHz

Fail

1385MHz

N/A

Driver and 3DMark Crash

 

Memory Clock Offset Overclocking

Memory Clock Speed Offset

Pass/Fail

Resulting Memory Speed

FPS Result

Notes

100MHz

Pass

3105MHz

42.38

 

200MHz

Pass

3206MHz

42.32

 

300MHz

Pass

3305MHz

42.40

 

400MHZ

Pass

3402MHz

42.49

 

500MHZ

Pass

3506MHz

42.34

 

600MHz

Pass

3602MHz

42.47

 

650MHz

Pass

3649MHz

42.79

 

700MHz

Pass

3649MHz

42.64

 

725MHz

Pass

3726MHz

42.64

Artifacts

 

Combined GPU and Memory overclocks together

GPU Offset

Memory Offset

Pass Fail

FPS Resuts

Notes

260MHz

700Mhz

Fail

N/A

 

250MHz

700Mhz

Pass

48.35

 

250MHz

650Mhz

Fail

N/A

 
               

 

 

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33103 09 Oct 2013 16:10
Those of you who are interested in small form factor builds will be really interested in this one. I have had this one sitting around for a while waiting to show off photos of it in our new lunchbox LAN rig but have been waiting on parts. I couldn't wait any longer and just had to show this card off to you guys! Enjoy
Plague's Avatar
Plague replied the topic: #33105 09 Oct 2013 21:54
Nice, review, just read it as I was opening mine of this card. hehe :) Can't wait to see how this all goes together.

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