Overclocking
When it comes to overclocking, we managed to gain an extra 380MHz on the clock speeds of the card, which is pretty impressive, along with our memory maxed out, like we see on all NVIDIA cards. Something that helped us to achieve this level of overclock is the fact that we were able to increase the power consumption of the card to 116%, which is more than typical for NVIDIA GPUs, especially at this tier. This result was consistent between both the Performance Mode and Silent Mode on the card, as those settings affect the fan curve and not the clock speeds. Taking a quick look at GPU-Z shows us just how far this pushes things, with our base clock boosted from 2,295MHz up to 2,588MHz, which is rivalling our stock boost clock of 2,675MHz. But with our overclock applied, that is boosted all the way up to 2,968MHz—though obviously, you can expect to see this boost even higher in actual usage. Our memory frequency also saw a healthy improvement, going from 1,750 MHz all the way up to 2,125MHz.
To see how the card manages to hold up in an extended gaming test, we ran F1 24 on loop for an hour on each mode and then each mode overclocked to see how it manages in a more realistic scenario. If you’re counting, that adds up to four hours of testing.
Keeping this brief since we have a lot to go through, and starting with Performance Mode at stock, we find that our stock results in Gaming Mode saw us sitting at pretty healthy temperatures, with both the core and memory averaging at around 57°C. In terms of clock speeds, we’re seeing about what we would expect, with an average around 2,740MHz, which is right around the boost clock for the card. Ensuring the card is running at these low temperatures and running stably are the fans, which at around 1,300 RPM on average, are running a little faster than I would expect for a cooler this big, but even so, they’re not really noticeable. The last thing to look at here is power draw, and we see it running a surprising amount lower than the 300W TDP of the card, with an average of only around 260W.
Then as we move over to Silent Mode, we see things actually running a slight bit cooler, with an average around 55°C on both the core and the memory. This becomes a little more confusing when we look at the fan speed and see it running quite a bit slower than the stock Gaming Mode test, with an average of about 1,030 RPM. Things do start to make sense when we look at the power draw, though, and notice that we’re running a little more power efficient, so there is less heat output overall. In terms of clock speeds, we didn’t really see any difference, since, as I mentioned before, the different modes focus more on the fan curves. Therefore, the only difference you could expect from clock speeds would be down to thermal performance, which doesn’t prove to be a problem anyway.
Moving on to the overclocks, and starting with the Performance Mode again, we can see that right off the bat, not a lot has changed with the temperature, only averaging 2°C higher than we saw at stock, now at around 59°C throughout the test. This higher temperature is clearly reflected in the rest of the results too, with an average clock speed of around 3,110MHz, an increased power draw up to around 280W on average, and as a result of all of that, a higher fan speed, now sitting around 1,400 RPM, but still not being what I’d class as noticeable.
Then, finally, here are the overclock results for Silent Mode, and to the surprise of no one, we see the card running hotter here, now even hotter than the Gaming Mode overclock, with an average temperature of about 60°C. Clock speed is roughly the same as we saw in Gaming Mode overclocked, with an average of around 3,110MHz, while the power draw also saw around the same average of 280W, but we did see slightly higher spikes here, which is worth noting. To wrap things up here, we need to quickly talk about the fan speed. With an average around 1,075 RPM, it’s clear to see why the average temperature is higher than before, as we’ve maintained a very similar fan speed to stock but with more power draw and higher core clocks. Regardless of that, though, the temperatures are still perfectly acceptable, and the fan speed is barely noticeable, especially when compared to the rest of the fans in our system.
