Overclocking the GK106 core is something that we have done many times before so we do know roughly where we should expect this card to get to. Unfortunately though, the silicon lottery has not played in our favour this time round with us only being able to get an extra 100Mz on the core clock speed on top of Asus 40Mz overclock. It still good to say that this is still a reasonable overclock and had we had a better chip I’m sure this would have seen closer to 1200MHz.
When it came to overclocking the memory, we found that like all NVIDIA cards, the memory overclocks very well, but within 3DMark11, we don’t notice that much of a gain in performance like we do when using an AMD card.
Once overclocked, as mentioned we didn’t see a significant gain from overclocking the memory, but with the GPU core overclocked, we saw a good gain over the shipped performance. At stock we achieved a 3DMark score of 1970 points and now we get 2138. The works out to an 8.5% gain in performance from a ~10% gain in core clock speed and a 16% gain in memory clock. We do know that the memory overclock with have an effect in real world gaming, but in this particular benchmark the results are not as profound
I’m especially impressed with the fact that it’s figures rival that of the old GTX 580.