Overclocking

MSI Afterburner has long been one of the best third-party overclocking utilities for Nvidia cards, and while the current version doesn’t appear to have the Scanner functionality (automatic GPU core overclocking), it still holds up very well for manual overclocks with a clear and intuitive UI.

Strangely, the power limit maximum for this card is a mere 104 percent, but the maximum temperature limit is the normal 88°C. We applied both of these values, and also put the voltage slider to its highest value to reduce any and all potential bottlenecks as much as possible.

Following this, we managed to add on a whopping 175MHz to the boost and base clocks, bringing them to 1,690MHz and 2,020MHz respectively. However, in-game boosting was still in the range of 2,000MHz and 2,070MHz, which is no better than what we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s also no worse, though, and suggests that power is a limiting factor (otherwise a boost clock of 2,020MHz would usually net you 2,100MHz or above for actual clocks).

The memory hit a peak speed of 15.6Gbps effective, which is an increase of over 11 percent.