Overclocking
While the GTX 980 Strix comes with a nice overclock right from Asus. I’m not one to leave things alone. I ran the card through our standard overclock testing to get an idea of how well it overclocks. What that means is I broke testing up into GPU overclocking, Memory overclocking, and then after that run the highest results from both together to see if the card can handle it. All the while I run through a 3DMark 11’s second test to confirm that the overclock is somewhat stable and to give us an average FPS to see the improvement the overclock gives you. The GTX 980 Strix has a GPU clock speed of 1279 stock so I jumped way ahead and started my overclocking with a 1400MHZZ with good luck then again at 1500MHz with good luck. From there I couldn’t get anything to pass so as it turns out my 1500MHz guess was spot on.
For memory testing I get a little more nervous and increase my overclocks slower to prevent damage. Stock was 7100MHz but from there I kept bumping things up until it failed at 8250Mhz. That put my peak memory overclock at 8200MHz. From there I went to combined testing but my initial run failed. I dropped the memory down but that didn’t fix it. Taking the GPU down to 1490MHz did it though. In the end I went from an average stock FPS of 81.76 up to 94.84. Without the memory overclock you would still see over 94 FPS as well so if you want to push your card without dealing with pushing the memory you can still see great improvements.
GPU Clock Speed Overclocking |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1279MHz |
Pass |
81.76 |
Stock |
1400MHz |
Pass |
90.14 |
|
1500MHz |
Pass |
94.45 |
|
1550MHz |
Failed |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1520MHz |
Failed |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1510MHz |
Failed |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking |
|||
Memory Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
7100MHz |
Pass |
81.76 |
Stock |
7300MHz |
Pass |
82.00 |
|
7600MHz |
Pass |
82.16 |
|
7900MHz |
Pass |
82.49 |
|
8000MHZ |
Pass |
82.75 |
|
8100MHz |
Pass |
83.09 |
|
8200MHz |
Pass |
82.83 |
|
8250MHz |
Failed |
82.53 |
Artifacts |
GPU and Memory Overclocks Together |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Memory Clock Speed |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1500MHz |
8200MHz |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1500MHz |
8100MHz |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1490MHz |
8100MHz |
94.84 |