Overclocking

Well it’s just not in my nature to leave things alone. After I finished all of my regular testing of the GTX 980 and I didn’t have to worry that blowing up the card would cause me to miss something for this review I was finally able to spend a little time overclocking. As usual what I did was break the overclocking down into three parts. Testing just the GPU clock speed, then just the memory, once I had those results I attempt to run them together to see if the card can handle the maximum overclock on each. Each overclock is tested in 3DMark 11 test 2 to see make sure it is stable enough to run. All along I document my results, notes, and average FPS results to see how well the card overclocks and what kind of improvement I see with it.

On the GPU Clock speed I started at stock speeds and worked my way up 100 MHz at a time. It wasn’t until I attempted 1500MHz that I ran into any issues, with that I was able to get an idea of what we can’t do to start fine tuning for a peak speed. I dropped it down to 1450MHz with good results but after that each attempt ended in a driver crash until I took it all the way back down to 1455MHz, just over our previous pass result. In the end I was able to edge out just under 250MHz out of the 980 without toying with any voltage at all. If given more voltage I have no doubt that the card can do even more. Most importantly though I went from 81.61 FPS all the way to 92.33 with the overclock, that is a nice performance improvement for a little work and no money.

On the memory side of things I went through the same testing, only this time my results were less encouraging. As you can see overclocking at all actually gave me a drop in performance until I had pushed the memory all the way to 8000MHz. After that I jumped right into combined testing to see if the higher memory clock speed would help improve on the already impressive GPU clock speed’s performance. Surprisingly the memory overclock helped more than I expected but in my option it still wasn’t worth the additional trouble or risk. In the end I was extremely happy with the overclocking potential of the GTX 980, I can’t wait to see what some of the cards with aftermarket cooling are able to do!