NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review: A Cheaper Titan X Arrives
Overclocking The GTX 980 Ti
We spent a little bit of time overclocking the GeForce GTX 980 Ti to see what kind of additional frequency headroom its huge 8 billion transistor GPU had left under the hood. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, which is designed to work with the new card.
EVGA's Precision X Tweaking Utility Running On The GeForce GTX Titan X
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 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 clock may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased.
EVGA Precision X Overclocked Data
To push the GTX 980 Ti's clock much higher than stock, we increased the power and temperature targets to 110% and 91'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets by 185MHz and 160MHz and re-ran a few tests. These settings were perfectly stable for us.
When all was said and done, our GeForce GTX 980 Ti's GPU overclocked from a peak, stock boost frequency of 1075MHz on up to an impressive 1387MHz. We re-ran a couple of benchmarks at 4K and saw some marginal performance increases in both. With more tweaking of frequencies, voltages, and the fan curve, we suspect the GeForce GTX 980 Ti can be pushed even higher. It's going to be interesting to see what NVIDIA's board partners come up with in terms of factory overclocked cards...
