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 |
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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 |
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275MHz |
Fail |
1411MHz |
N/A |
Driver and 3DMark Crash |
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260MHz |
Fail |
1385MHz |
N/A |
Driver and 3DMark Crash |
|||
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking |
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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 |
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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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