I’ll personally never bother with a GPU overclock unless it adds a substantial gain to the FPS, and with the GTX 980, we’ve got one. In my particular case, I saw the GTX 980 peak at 1,450MHz, with clocks at around 1,420MHz being seen more often than the flat 1,400MHz. GTX 980 Overclock – 1,400MHz Core, 7,750MHz Memoryīecause an overclock on a current NVIDIA GPU doesn’t take into account GPU Boost, any clock you set will in actuality go higher when playing a game.

While I do believe this particular sample could go a bit higher on both the Core and Memory, the clocks I reached are definitely safe in terms of stability. Any time I thought I found a stable overclock beyond that, subsequent 3DMark runs proved me wrong. Since the launch of the GTX 900 series, I’ve looked around to get an idea of what these cards could be overclocked to, and I’ve seen many go beyond 1,400MHz. Using ASUS’ excellent GPU Tweak tool, the max stable overclock I was able to reach was 1,400MHz Core and 7,750MHz Memory. The GTX 980’s reference clocks are 1,126MHz Core and 7,000MHz Memory, and from my testing, I’ve found GPU Boost 2.0 to peak the Core at about 1,253MHz – a 127MHz gain.

Secondly, I take care to not go overboard – I boost the power target by 10%, and the peak temperature by 5☌ (which, as it happens, isn’t needed). I think overclocks should be realistic, and not push the boundary so far that a user risks their PC crashing while in the middle of a game. If I can’t hammer the card with benchmark after benchmark and see it pass a two-hour stress test, I don’t consider it stable. Both cards will be interesting to look at from the overclocking perspective, but as the GTX 970 comes equipped with an impressive overclock already, it might prove to be the more interesting of the two.īefore we take a look at the results, I want to explain what I consider to be a good overclock. When we were briefed by the company a couple of weeks ago, it made a point to say that Maxwell was a very overclockable architecture, and as the results here will prove, it wasn’t joking.įor GTX 980 overclocking, I’ll be making use of NVIDIA’s reference card, whereas for the GTX 970, ASUS’ Strix will fill the role. With our look at NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 and 970 out-of-the-way, I thought I’d spend some time taking a look at them again, but this time from an overclocking perspective.

Evga precision x tutorial gtx 970