Testing Part Two: Overclocked
Generally I put a disclaimer about overclocking killing your hardware here. That is not a problem with this card, you can’t kill it without software that is under a very, very strict NDA or with a soldering iron. Even if I’d signed the NDA and gotten the software I couldn’t tell you about it anyway, so I’m approaching this like a normal user.
Overclocking the GPU too far can cause crashes and related data loss, but it won’t hurt your hardware.
Unfortunately I did not find this card to be nearly as overclockable as the 660Ti. The memory overclocked a lot, but the core was only willing to go up 53MHz. Tragic, really.
1800MHz RAM worked for most benchmarks but not all of them. The final boost clocks are a bit over 1200MHz.
I used Gigabytes overclocking software for the OC, it’s somewhat clunky as you don’t get any slider bars, just up and down arrows, or you can type a number in. The only real issue is that when you close the software the OC disappears and you return to stock clocks. I generally prefer EVGA’s Precision X software for Kepler OCing, I’ve had the best results with it and it has slider bars for quick/easy OCing.
3DMark03
Up 5k here, not bad for a quick OC.
3DMark Vantage
Just shy of 2000 improvement marks here, the GTX660Ti that OC’d so much further is only a couple hundred marks behind (the 4.5GHz CPU clocks used for the 660Ti help a lot).
3DMark11 Performance
We got a decent boost OCing. Can’t compare directly with the 660Ti due to using the new standard Funkykit GPU / Memory Testing CPU Speed of 4GHz, the 660Ti was done at 4.5GHz. I was hoping to see over 10k on this test. For giggles I cranked the CPU up to 4.5GHz and got 10060 marks, still shy of the 660Ti’s 10172. The higher core speed is brutal.
3DMark11 Extreme
Pretty nice score boost here too, still wouldn’t be especially playable as a game, but so be it. As far as GPU performance goes, this is solid, but the 7970 GHz editions with AMD’s new drivers is significantly higher.
HWBot Unigine heaven
10% faster than the 660Ti here in DX9, even with both overclocked. Heaven really does like memory bandwidth.
The 670 stomps the 660Ti into the ground here, it’s not even close. The limited OCing room means it doesn’t stack up well against OC’d 7970s for the most part. Stock 7970s it compares well against.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
Pretty decent gain even with the small OC.
Battlefield 3
The OC got us over the 60FPS mark here. This beats similarly priced 7970s, though the higher priced higher factory overclocked cards win out.
All told the limited overclocking put a damper on things, though the higher RAM speed definitely helped. The core didn’t OC far enough to make it a night and day difference in FPS, though the synthetics did increase decently. I was hoping for more OCing room.
