Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming: Killer 1080P Gaming
Overclocking The GTX 960 Gaming G1
We spent a little bit of time overclocking the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming to see what kind of additional frequency headroom its GPU had left under the hood. For these tests, we used Gigabyte's own OC Guru II tweaking utility, which is designed to work with a vast array of graphics cards.
Overclocking a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX series graphics card requires a bit more tweaking then previous-gen products, due to all of the new options available and the complexities associated with GPU Boost. Sometimes, you’ll find that increasing a particular target 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 clock may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased, thermals and power permitting.
OC Guru II GPU Health Data
To push the GTX 960's clock much higher than stock, we increased the power and temperature targets, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets by 161MHz and 91MHz, respectively and re-ran a few tests. Ultimately, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming proved to be a potent overclocker.
When all was said and done, our card overclocked to over 1465MHz, with 3.6GHz memory. We re-ran a couple of benchmarks and saw some nice gains. Performance in Thief increased a bit, but 3DMark showed an almost 400 point gain in the overall score and the GPU score jumped up by 462 points, or roughly 6%.
