Overclocking

When we test a new architecture I never really know what to expect, especially when going into overclocking. Sometimes they overclock well and other times they just don’t leave much headroom. To put Maxwell to the test, I ran the GTX 750 Ti through our standard overclock testing. I test for max GPU clock speed by bumping up my overclock bit by bit and then running through a benchmark in 3DMark 11. I do the same with the memory overclock, and then I attempt to put them together and make sure they both will run together. I document all of my results including the average FPS result of the benchmark in the table below.

Overclocking the GPU didn’t take too long really. I started with an overclock of 1100MHz according to the Asus overclocking tool that I was using (+80 offset to everyone else), with the GPU Boost the resulting clock speed ended up being 1165MHz. I continued bumping up my overclock until I hit the peak offset/overclock that it would allow me to do. With the GPU Boost the end overclock ended up being 1282MHz. There seems to still be a lot more room left in the card truth be told. I bet we will see big numbers with Maxwell once we have cards with dedicated power connections and the juice to back up the overclocks.

On to memory overclocking, I spent a while bumping up and passing through our test. It wasn’t until I attempted a crazy overclock of 7300MHz that I started seeing issues. There wasn’t a crash, just some artifacts but with a clock speed like that we had to be pushing the limits. In the end my max memory overclock was 7100MHz, WELL over the 5400MHz clock speed that comes on the card. Lastly I put the GPU and memory overclocks together and gave it a try. Not only did it work, but we ended up with an impressive FPS average as well. We started with a 28.42 FPS result with a small overclock and ended up with 32.33. That is nearly a 14% increase in performance, not bad at all for a little card that pulls all of its power off the PCI bus.