[section_title title=”Overclocking”]Overclocking
ASUS have been synonymous with overclocking for over a decade now with their ROG (Republic of Gamers) range and the Strix is effectively built upon ROG DNA; this means I am expecting a good round of overclocking from the Strix OC card. Now this particular card doesn’t have the most blistering out of the box overclock with stock clocks of 1178/1753MHz with a boost of 1279MHz on the core. This directly up against the ZOTAC Extreme GTX 980 doesn’t seem all that much but with a high focus on cooling performance and silence, it evens itself out in the grand scheme of things.
So onto the actual overclocking, I really do believe that overclocking has become a little hard since the introduction of “boost” technology but I also believe that the implementation is a good thing; the performance is there exactly when you need it. How that relates to actually overclocking can be a little bit of trial and error as opposed to adding clock speeds directly to the core and hoping it’s stable. As usual, I generally go up in increments of 10MHz on the core and 50MHz on the memory; this is after of course I raise the clocks to an acceptable value in my estimation which was 1350MHz and 1900MHz respectively.
After running Unigine Valley Extreme HD to test stability, I eventually managed to get 1374/1965MHz stable which equates to a boost value of 1475MHz on the core; a very tasty overclock indeed and it really shows the power of the ASUS equipped VRMs and DIGI power technology. This is an increase of 16.6% on the base core with an increase of around 15% on the boost core; not scaling fully but 1475MHz is still a very much respected overclock in my estimations. The memory also scaled pretty well with a nice 12% increase in terms of clock speed.
So now we have found the overclocking potential of our sample, it’s time to take a look at how this all equates to actual performance; real world gaming and of course synthetically. How will it perform? Let’s find out…
