Clock Speed Consistency and Overclocking

Clock Speed Consistency – Founders Edition vs EVGA SC Black Edition

This was a quick little experiment that we ran on the two cards we had in-house. Normally, we do not receive two cards with the same out-of-box clock speeds. As a result, doing cooler to cooler comparisons and seeing how boost clock speeds are affected is difficult to do. Because the EVGA SC Black Edition has to ship with the same reference settings as the Founders Edition, this gives us that ability. The graph below looks at the sustained clock speeds and temperatures of the two cards when looping through Unigine Heaven.

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As you can see, the EVGA card not only provides higher and more stable peak clocks during sustained usage, it does so with much lower temperatures on the GPU itself. This leaves you more headroom for overclocking, and means the card and fans can generate less noise, and extends the life of your silicon by keeping it cooler.

Overclocking the EVGA GTX 1070 Ti SC Black Edition

Our short time with the EVGA SC Black Edition resulted in the standard overclocking experience we are used to seeing with NVIDIA GeForce hardware. It’s a simple, easy to accomplish task that nets results easily visible in gaming workloads. By setting our target power to 120% and pushing up the frequency offset for the GPU, we were able to come to a result of +150 MHz.

The result in our testing is sustained clock speeds hitting 1987 MHz – impressive!

As an aside, the Precision XOC automated overclocking that is prompted to the consumer is going to be less aggressive. EVGA doesn’t increase the power target of the card and instead aims to emulate the clock speeds a user would get out of the box on an FTW model. Our result there was an offset of +114 MHz – not too bad for clicking literally two buttons. 

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