Overclocking

For reference, here is our stock run of Time Spy.

We typically like to test the automatic overclocking tools first, and Firestorm runs through its approximately 10-minute tuning process and gives us this curious result. We tried to run it, but it crashed almost instantly in every game and benchmark. So much for that one.

We crank the fans up and go in manually. We’d typically max out the power target here, but Zotac has this model locked to a maximum of 100% so there are no gains to be made here. The temperature target does go from 83C to 87C so perhaps that will get us an extra step or two on the boost. We go ahead and jump the core clock +50Mhz.

This takes us from a Graphics score of 19179 to 19651, not bad.

Next, we jump the core to +100MHz.

This gets us a small bump in score again, but we can’t go any further without instability.

We are seeing the card is slamming into power limits pretty hard at this point, but the turbo clock does reach a peak of 2055MHz. Not only are we hitting the board power limit, but take a look at the individual power connectors. Each 8-pin is hovering very close to the 150W limit, and the PCIe slot is near its 75W limit. By ATX specifications, we can’t get much more here.

Next, we go after memory, going up 100Mhz at a time.

At +100MHz core and +200 Mhz memory speed, we get our best score yet at 19948 or almost exactly a 4% increase overall.