Memory overclocking on the other hand doesn’t end up being quite as extreme, but we’ve known from the start that at 7GHz for the stock memory clock, we were already pushing the limits for GDDR5 and NVIDIA’s memory controllers. At 1.25v I’m not sure too much more voltage is good for the GPU in the long term – that’s already quite a bit of voltage for a TSMC 28nm process – but I suspect there is some untapped headroom left in the GPU at higher voltages. This also leaves us wondering just how much farther GM204 could overclock if we were able to truly overvolt it. That makes this the first NVIDIA card we have tested to surpass both 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz, all in one fell swoop. Even without real voltage controls we were able to push another 250MHz (22%) out of our GM204 GPU, resulting in an overclocked base clock of 1377MHz and more amazingly an overclocked maximum boost clock of 1515MHz. GTX 980 does not let us down, and like its lower end Maxwell 1 based counterpart the GTX 980 turns in an overclocking performance just short of absurd. Meanwhile TDP controls are limited to whatever value NVIDIA believes is safe for that model card, which can vary depending on its GPU and its power delivery design.įor GTX 980 we have a 125% TDP limit, meanwhile we are able to overvolt by 1 boost bin to 1265MHz, which utilizes a voltage of 1.25v. Overvolting is limited to NVIDIA’s built in overvoltage function, which isn’t so much a voltage control as it is the ability to unlock 1-2 more boost bins and their associated voltages. This is a legacy we would be glad to see repeated for GTX 980, and is a legacy we are going to put to the test.Īs with NVIDIA’s Kepler cards, NVIDIA’s Maxwell cards are subject to NVIDIA’s stringent power and voltage limitations. GM107 could overclock so well that upon initial release, NVIDIA did not program in enough overclocking headroom in their drivers to allow for many GTX 750 Ti cards to be overclocked to their true limits. One of GTX 750 Ti’s more remarkable features was its overclocking headroom.

Evga precision x settings for gtx 980