[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
Overclocking, the art of getting “free” performance from your hardware to alleviate the need to upgrade. A commonly used trait due to how easy and accessible it has become over the years; NVDIA graphics cards even overclock themselves in the way of GPU boost technology. The current version of GPU Boost 2.0 works like a dream and helps to squeeze extra performance from your card when it needs it; extra performance on demand is nothing to be sniffed at! Let’s see how the MSI GTX 960 2G Gaming does in this regard…
So with the GTX 960 being labelled as the “overclockers dream” by NVIDIA in the lead up to the launch of the Maxwell variant, is it really the case or a desperate attempt to lure enthusiasts into a honey trap? Well all in all, as much as I probably don’t quite agree 100% with NVIDIA on the phrase “overclockers dream”, I do feel the GTX 960 offers enough to satisfy me in terms of overclocking gains.
I was able to gain a decent overclock of 1375/1978MHz over stock clocks of 1190/1753MHz; this represents an increase of around 15.5% and 12.8% respectively. Bear in mind that due to NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology, the Maxwell core boosts to 1438MHz but in some very high demanding applications, this can sometimes reach out to around 1500MHz; an impressive feat for such a “budget” minded card.
As you can see by the graphs below, the card is more limited by the VRAM than anything else as FPS gains in Battlefield 4 are marginal at best with 1440p in comparison to the percentage gains on clocks; it does however stretch its legs very well in synthetic benchmarks as you can see…
