As we mentioned, this card comes pre-overclocked straight out of the factory, and from the performance we’ve seen, it certainly has an edge, giving some really strong performance considering its price point. With this in mind, we wanted to see how far we could push the card beyond that and with a stock GPU core of 1059MHz and memory clock of 1502MHz, we were pretty confident that it could be taken quite a bit further.
To get started, we fired up MSI Afterburner and pushed the power limits to the max and proceeded to individually push up both the GPU core clock speed and memory clock speed. Once the maximum was found for both, we applied them together and though we had to tweak the clocks slightly to get them to work together, we ended up with some fantastic overclocks.
From its already pre-overclocked speed of 1059MHZ, we managed to push it to 1296MHz giving us a 22.37% increase, and the memory from 1502MHz to 1901MHz giving us a 26.5% increase and an effective speed of 7.60Gbps. We knew that the GK104 was a fantastic core to overclock, and these results clearly show that to be the truth.
To see how much more true performance the card gives with our new overclocks, we went back into 3DMark 11 to see how things had changed, and as you can see the initial score of 2928 points was increased with thanks to the overclock to 3520 giving us a 20.2% increase.
really, all that pretty design and the cooler’s cables aren’t black? it’s just a little observation
I love the look of that cooler, especially in it’s silver colour.
why does it say GTX 600 series on the cooler?
wow, huge overclock.
Good card + innovative design in cooler. Sums it all. :)
@Andy, nice, detailed review. :)
I got mine today and absolutely love it. GPU runs at 1200 / 1306 boost and ram at 1895.