[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
The ZOTAC GTX 770 AMP! Edition is a pre-overclocked card and it is rare to get a lot of extra performance from the GPU without it needing some serious hardware modifications as it is already overclocked so highly. It’s always nice to get an extra few FPS from your card without having to pay for it so we at Play3r always aim to get the best possible performance from our components. As some of you may know, a few of us here do things on the extreme side with dry ice and/or liquid nitrogen at times but that will never come into the equation in our day-to-day reviews (unless it’s specifically asked for).
With the above in mind, it was time to find out how well this card would overclock, and even though I wasn’t expecting too much as the core frequency was already so high, I set forth on my overclocking adventure and the game begun. I usually run the card through either Heaven Extreme or Valley Extreme HD a few times to determine if the card will be able to withstand the game benchmarks and such and I quickly hit a wall at a mere 45MHz faster than its clock speed. I wasn’t quite able to maintain 1200MHz on the core as it occasionally crashed when the boost kicked in but 1195MHz, with a boost to 1247MHz, proved to be stable enough to complete our entire suite without crashing. It may not sound like much, and yes the ASUS did double that in terms of its overclock and sat at 1253MHz on the core before its boost kicked in. You have to remember that the ASUS is geared towards overclockers, and has a much better power delivery system than the ZOTAC but it is also the more expensive card.
The memory is Samsung based as mentioned previously and it did manage to get a little closer to that magic 2GHz marker which the ASUS didn’t manage. I ended up with a final speed of 1988MHz (7952MHz effectively) which is a 188MHz increase over its stock value, or roughly 10% if you prefer that figure instead.
Increased clock speeds will naturally translate into better performance, but how much better will the card be? Let’s put it to the test and find out.
