Asus DirectCU NVIDIA and AMD Graphics Round-Up

Name: Asus DirectCU NVIDIA and AMD Graphics Round-Up - Page 16
Brand: Asus

by Mathew Miranda — Thursday, April 21, 2011, 11:00 AM EDT

Overclocking Performance

Page 16: Overclocking Performance

Overclocking is not an exact science. When it comes to overclocking headroom, every GPU is different. And just because your friend's GTX 580 hit 1000MHz doesn't mean that yours will, even using the same settings and hardware. Many factors can influence what a video card is capable of, starting with the unique capability of each GPU. These factors may also include complementary components within the system, but we find the primary influence is the type of cooling used on the graphics card.

Overclocking

Push it to the limit

To overclock the DirectCU video cards, we used the Asus Smart Doctor utility. Here, we're showing the rated frequency of the cards in blue, and the overclocked speeds we reached in gold. Relatively speaking, the GTX 570 was the most impressive of the group, reaching 970 MHz from its rated speed of 742 MHz, a 31% boost. The GTX 580 increased by 28%, the HD 6950 by 25%, and the HD 6870 by 18%. Interestingly, the HD 6970 was only able to muster an 8% overclock.

We also overclocked the memory and got some pretty good results. The HD 6950 hit 1530 MHz, an increase of 22% over its rated frequency. It was followed by the GTX 570 with a 21% increase, and the 580 with a 20% bump. In addition, the HD 6870 was able to improve by 19%. Once again, the HD 6970 brings up the rear with a 19% overclock.