Overclocking

One thing we were alerted to by NVIDIA withe the GTX 750 Ti was the headroom that the new Maxwell GM107 GPU was providing for overclocking.  Unfortunately, the tools used for overclocking were not updated to allow for really stretching the Maxwell parts.  As you'll see in our overclocking results below, we easily hit an artificial software wall before we hit any kind of hardware wall.

Using the MSI Afterburner software I was easily able to move the slider for Core Clock offset to the maximum level of +135 MHz without adjusting any voltage settings at all.  That brings the core clock from 1020 MHz to 1155 MHz which is a great boost.  I also pushed the memory clocks from 1350 MHz to 1600 MHz (6.4 GHz effective) and gave the GPU the maximum voltage offset (just 31 mV) to maintain 100% stability.  The result is a significantly faster card that also still clearly has some room to run in front of it.

In fact, a quick check of the GPU-Z clock speed logs during our testing of Metro Last Light shows consistent GPU Boost clocks at 1297 MHz!  That is a full 27% faster than the reference base speed.  Clearly there is room for Maxwell to be overclocked even further once Afterburner, Precision X and GPU Tweak get updated accordingly.  

Let's take a quick look at some performance results from this overclocked state.

The 3DMark Fire Strike results increase by 11% over the reference levels.

Clearly in our game tests the overclocked settings of the GeForce TX 750 Ti make a significant difference.  Battlefield 4 is running about 10% faster, Bioshock Infinite 14% and Metro: Last Light 13%.  Those are great performance gains to see and considering we were limited not by the hardware but by artificial, temporary software restrictions, I expect we'll find more headroom in these cards very soon.

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