[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! So the GTX 960, yes it’s small, it has 1 x 6pin powering it but is it the “overclockers dream” NVIDIA have led us to believe?
It’s an interesting notion because it wasn’t too long ago that NVIDIA weren’t playing ball with a lot of overclockers with restrictions on what partners could do in terms of PCB; me being an overclocking enthusiast suffered due to this but with demand back in favour, overclocking is here and it has no signs of slowing down! The GTX 960 is no different and although it has fairly high out of the box stock clocks (1253/1800MHz), I was hoping that the ASUS Strix had potential to kick into gear and blitz stock into the distance
So tackling the new ASUS GPU Tweak software, well the new revision I should say was nothing less than a pleasure to use; most software overclocking applications for graphics cards now follow the same basic principles. Of course like normal, you have to go into the settings to enable unlocked voltages, this is mainly for a novices protection; don’t want to kill your card without knowing exactly what you are doing do you? Well going into the overclocking itself, as always I whack the thermal limit and power up to full blast; 115% in this particular samples case. With a bit of tweaking including voltage, core speed and of course memory, I managed to attain a stable overclock of 1442MHz/1846MHz boost respectively; not blistering by any means but certainly good enough to warrant overclock branding.
Of course, an overclock of just under 9.5% is hardly far from impressive on a card like a GTX 980 but given the GTX 960’s 5 phase design (Thanks ASUS) and absolute fantastic power efficiency, I declare a victory here today; I expect some other models might overclock further but in the grand scheme of things, this card is perfect for its intended purpose, well overclocking wise it is!
