GeForce GTX 980 Ti Round-Up With MSI, ASUS, And EVGA

We spent a little time overclocking the GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards features here to see what kind of additional frequency headroom they had left under their hoods. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, but MSI and ASUS also have similar utilities available for download on their respective websites.

Like Kepler, overclocking a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX series graphics card requires a bit more tweaking then previous-gen products if you'd like to wring every last bit of performance from the cards, due to all of the new options available and the complexities associated with GPU Boost. Sometimes, you’ll find that increasing a particular voltage or frequency may appear to function properly, when in fact performance decreases due to errors or throttling. You may also find that the actual GPU Boost clocks may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased.


To push the cards past their already factory-overclocked defaults, we kept things simple. We increased the power and temperature targets to 110% and 90'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU offset until we experienced instability or any visual anomalies.


All of the cards we tested were good overclockers. With the minimal effort outlined above (we could have also tweaked fan profiles and voltages), we were able to take the MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G up to a 1444MHz peak boost clock, the ASUS STRIX card up to 1529MHz, and the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC+ up to 1437MHz. Now, those are the peak GPU clocks as reported by precision. But as you can see, the MSI card was able to sustain a higher average boost clock overall, hence the better overall score in 3DMark.

While overclocked even further then their default configurations, all of the cards showed nice performance improvements, as outlined in the chart above.