[section_title title=Overclocking]
Overclocking
ASUS haven’t only been spending copious amounts of time and money researching new ways to improve upon their existing coolers or products, but have set about creating a new and easy to use overclocking software utility. I am of course talking about ASUS GPU Tweak II and it has more features than you can physically shake a stick at! Not only does the GTX 980 Ti DCU3 STRIX come with a year’s Xsplit gamecaster license, but it has made pushing the limits even easier with their one click overclock button; this is actually called OC mode. There are also 2 other modes namely gaming and silent mode which are self-explanatory; gaming gives the perfect balance between performance, coolness and silence, whereas silent focuses mainly on…well silence!
Another neat feature is the “Boost my System” button, which allows you change aspects like visual effects, system services and even allows for defragmentation of system memory. For those looking for an easy way to optimise their gaming experience, ASUS have the most sophisticated graphics card software suite currently on the market, although I did find it a tad unstable at times depending and caused numerous crashes when using it. A big problem? Not really as it is new and it could have easily been our operating system causing the problem; we have lots of things going on at once so it is easy to throw compatibility issues!
That being said, the ASUS STRIX GTX 980 Ti DCU3 comes with a solid out of the box overclock of 1216MHz with a stock boost of 1317MHz; easily one of the best and fastest out of the box cards on the market. I knew overclocking was going to be hit and miss here, as with previous cards such as the ZOTAC EXTREME AMP! cards, having all of the hard work in overclocking done in the factory with little more to be pushed out of it.
The 980Ti STRIX though did allow me to get a bit more out of it without much effort involved and I managed to settle on an overclock of 1286MHz, with a boost speed of 1387MHz. The memory wasn’t very co-operative however and I only managed a maximum memory clock speed of 1875MHz. Overall however, the card is fast enough out of the box and with an overclock applied, the results below speak for themselves. Not only is the card one of the best on test in terms of performance, but its cooling performance is fantastic too!
