[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
With the introduction of Pascal and the new GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 GPUs, things are a little bit different to Maxwell. Firstly, the new GPUs have what’s called a “utilisation target.” What this essentially involves is that the card monitors the load the game/application (some vary in intensity and tries to match the core with said level of intensity etc. This provides the power when it’s actually needed as opposed to going “balls to the walls” 24/7; sort of like an adaptive method, but one I believe to be great for gamers.
As we swear by MSI Afterburner for ALL GPU overclocking when we aren’t forced to use other software by manufacturers, if you would like to read more about implications and methods of overclocking with the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, then please CLICK HERE!
Going directly back to the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X, I found the card to be of significant importance to not just performance, but of how “extra” performance can be achieved. Thanks to the MSI Gaming App, there is 3 available presets to choose from if you aren’t too keen, or experienced, or even confident enough to try overclocking yourself. The 3 settings are Silent (which is self-explanatory), Gaming and OC mode.
As you can see, the Silent mode down clocks which sacrifices the performance for optimal acoustics, whereas the OC mode bumps up the GPU clock for all that free extra performance you could want. The middle ground is of course the Gaming mode which is a good compromise between gaming performance and not having the fans going nuts during very intensive games.
Moving on to manually overclocking the GTX 1070 Gaming X, I managed to achieve a very impressive overclock of +175 MHz on the core and +845 MHz on the memory. This equates to a boosting clock of 1947 MHz on the core (superb) and 2425 MHz on the memory (equally superb). Below you can see how the card did against itself in each of the different modes and of course, with the manual overclock applied.
Below you can see how the card did against itself in each of the different modes and of course, with the manual overclock applied.
When under extreme pressure, the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X with my manual overclock applied ended up boosting at an absolute amazing 2114MHz on the core; this obviously gave a notable performance increase in 3DMark and of course, in Total War: Rome II.
I would consider the 1080 to be a 4k card, the 1070 to be a 1440p card and the 1060 to be the 1080p card. Not sure why the 4k expectation on a lesser performing card should be a “con”.
doesn’t make any sense to publish “overall” scores instead of “graphics” (talking about Firestrike of course).