Overclocking
Out of the box this card comes with an impressive 140mhz overclock over a reference GTX560 card. Unfortunately this means that there is less headroom for overclocking than a standard card. If this card had voltage control, and a better heatsink I’m sure it would have dont some crazy clocks. But since it is otherwise limited by voltage and temperatures I was only able to hit 50mhz higher core frequency than what comes out of the box. Had the heatsink been able to properly cool the card, I would have been able to run all the tests at 1050mhz core clock. But instead I had to settle at a not too shabby 1ghz, over that I was met by 99*C temperatures quickly.
Lets see if there was any increase in scores with a modest 50mhz overclock:
3dMark Vantage
Physx On:
Physx Off:
With physx on there was over a 500-point increase in score from a simple 50mhz overclock over stock speeds. That is nothing to scoff at!
With Physx off, the story is the same. Around a 500-point increase from a small overclock on top of the already very aggressive stock clocks.
Heaven
Normal Tesselation:
Extreme Tesselation:
Normal tesselation gave some solid scores. Raising the core frequency raised the minimum fps by 9fps which was huge, max fps was raise a bit as well which is solid. You aren’t going to get extreme differences with normal tesselation from a stock to overclocked state since this card is already overclocked alot out of the box.
Extreme tesselation was more of the same. You get a little boost, but nothing that is going to be game-changing.
Far Cry 2
The modest overclock wasn’t able to put up too much of a difference from stock. 82.22fps average compared to an overclocked 82.70fps isn’t going to be a make or break difference for this game.
Dirt 3
Like the other benches, the 50mhz boost in core clock has translated to roughly a 1fps increase across the board. It is not quite a massive difference, but over the reference clocks these differences are large.
Stalker: Call of Pripyat
Oddly, minimum FPS went down from overclocking this card in Stalker. But on the upside, max fps raised enough to make up for it. There aren’t huge differences, but those small 2-3fps differences can make a difference when you are below 60fps.
Street Fighter IV
This game saw a pretty nice fps bump over stock scores from the small overclock. 6fps would have been better in some of the games running lower fps since we’re already in the 150fps range in this test but it is a nice boost none the less.
Overall, we didn’t see too much of a boost from overclocking this card a modest amount over the already aggressive stock clocks. Had better cooling and voltage control been implemented it would have been awesome to see what this card can really do. Maybe Zotac can release a special AMP card with those features.
