Overclocking, Overclocked Benchmark Results
First, a disclaimer: Overclocking can cause hardware damage, void warranties, and cause the abrupt death of hardware. Overclock at your own risk!
For the overclocked GPU results I also overclocked the CPU to 4.2GHz, this is a speed attainable by the vast majority of 2500k and 2600k CPUs given halfway decent cooling. I figure that few people will OC their GPU but not their CPU.
The first thing I discovered was that I had no software voltage control in the programs I usually use. Between that and the factory overclock I found that there wasn’t a lot of OCing room left. The stock GPU core voltage is 1.2v, much lower than the 1.35 that many people are using to overclock. I expect that if I were to give this card 1.35v it would go much higher. As it is I was able to get it to run happily at 1141MHz core and 1325MHz memory, not that much higher than the stock 1100/1250MHz, but enough to make a difference in benchmarks. Benchmark results follow:
Street Fighter IV (DX 9)
Default Benchmark – 1680×1050, AA x16, AF x16, Ultra Detail
117FPS beats 113FPS, though both are far higher than the 60FPS required to match the refresh rate of most monitors.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim gained a bit, the minimum FPS went from 38 to 41, average from 45 to 47, and maximum went from 55 to 56. Not huge, but the minimum gaining 3FPS isn’t bad.
Unigine Heaven (DX9/DX11) (HWBot Edition)
Heaven DX9:
1667 is solid, the overclocked 1738 is more solid. Can’t complain there.
Heaven DX11:
Not as much of a gain here, but still noticeable.
3D Mark Vantage
Performance Benchmark – 1280×1024 (Performance Preset)
The GPU test gained a whopping 84 points, Vantage was not impressed by the overclocking.
3DMark11
The overclock helped 3D11 more than Vantage, but most of the increased score is coming from the CPU clocks here.
All told overclocking doesn’t help much, due to gigabyte doing a good job of overclocking the card from the factory. This is a plus in my book as usually pre-overclocked cards aren’t overclocked anywhere near their limits. This shows that Gigabyte is paying attention to their cards, I appreciate that.
Even overclocked the fan was extremely quiet. Putting my head inside the case right next to the fan I was able to hear a very small amount of noise, further away and/or with the case side panel attached I could hear nothing.
