Is that shiny-new GeForce GTX 980 Ti not fast enough for you? Overclock it!
GeForce GTX 980 Ti is fast; this we know. And now that you’ve just spent $650 on your new "baby Titan X," what are you planning to do? Sure, you could play games all day, but we have other plans. With the initial review all wrapped up in a tidy bow, we wanted to soup up our hot rod and overclock the 980 Ti. So today, we’re sharing the results of our testing. Just to be clear, overclocking isn’t something to be done haphazardly. We noted in the review that bumping the GPU clocks by 10 percent and the GDDR5 clocks by 5 percent should be an easy and safe goal that any 980 Ti can attain. Turns out those are very tame targets, and now that we’ve had a couple of extra days of testing we’re ready to kick it up a notch.
The stock clocks on the 980 Ti are 1,000MHz core and 7,010MHz VRAM. We’re not trying to redline the card here, as fine-tuning to the ragged edge of stability takes more time, not to mention the variability between cards as well as games. Instead, armed with EVGA’s Precision X16 utility and with a knowledge of how well GTX 980 and Titan X overclock, we set our sights on settings that should be in reach of any well-cooled system. First, we set the power target to the maximum plus 10 percent (275W instead of 250W), as without increasing the power target we aren’t likely to see much in the way of performance gains. With that done, we pushed the throttle until we encountered turbulence, and then we eased off a bit and settled for a bump of 200MHz on the core and 800MHz (plus 400MHz in Precision X16) on the VRAM.
That represents a rather impressive 20 percent core overclock and an 11 percent RAM overclock—and since the core is likely to play a bigger role in most games we’re looking at, this represents as big of a jump as going from GTX 970 to GTX 980, or from the 980 to the 980 Ti. All for free, thanks to the magic of overclocking.
Except few things in life are truly “free,” and the cost with overclocking comes in two forms. First, no matter what anyone tries to tell you, there is always a bit of risk involved with pushing computer hardware beyond the prescribed limits. We’re all big boys and girls at Maximum PC, and more than willing to take that risk, but we have had components fail on us in the past. Never say “never.” The added stress on the hardware can also cause fans to fail sooner than they otherwise might—just ask any reformed Bitcoin miner how many GPU fans they killed. [Ed—For reference, in one year I managed to ruin both fans on four out of five dual-fan Radeon HD 7950 cards; then again, only one out of ten of my blower fans failed.]
The second cost is less of a concern for enthusiasts: power and noise. Power requirements scale linearly with clock speed and quadratically with voltage (P≈cV 2f). Since overclocking increases both frequency and voltage, power use can go up quite a bit. More power use means more heat to dissipate, so fans have to spin faster, and that makes your system noisier. It also means potentially higher electricity bills, but not as much as you might think. To wit, even if you use 100W extra and play games for eight hours every day for an entire year—as a pro gamer or living in your mama’s basement, we won’t judge!—that’s only $30–$60 for most US residents. Skip eating out a couple of times and you’re set. But we’ll check power requirements regardless.
Enough Already! Show Us the Overclocked 980 Ti Benchmarks
| Average Frame Rates | ||||
| Game | Resolution | GTX 980 Ti | 980 Ti OC | Improvement |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 1080p | 181 | 208 | 14.9% |
| 1440p | 110 | 128 | 16.4% | |
| 2160p | 53 | 62 | 17.0% | |
| GTAV | 1080p | 63 | 70 | 11.1% |
| 1440p | 46 | 53 | 13.8% | |
| 2160p | 24 | 28 | 17.1% | |
| Hitman: Absolution | 1080p | 93 | 103 | 11.1% |
| 1440p | 63 | 72 | 15.4% | |
| 2160p | 32 | 37 | 14.8% | |
| Metro: Last Light | 1080p | 111 | 124 | 11.9% |
| 1440p | 77 | 90 | 17.6% | |
| 2160p | 41 | 49 | 20.0% | |
| Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor | 1080p | 113 | 133 | 17.2% |
| 1440p | 81 | 97 | 19.2% | |
| 2160p | 46 | 55 | 19.6% | |
| Tomb Raider | 1080p | 131 | 154 | 17.2% |
| 1440p | 87 | 105 | 21.3% | |
| 2160p | 44 | 52 | 20.0% | |
| Unigine Heaven 4.0 | 1080p | 97 | 114 | 18.0% |
| 1440p | 60 | 71 | 18.0% | |
| 2160p | 25 | 30 | 18.1% | |
| The Witcher 3 | 1080p | 56 | 63 | 12.6% |
| 1440p | 45 | 50 | 11.6% | |
| 2160p | 28 | 31 | 11.8% | |
| Average of Eight Tests | 1080p | 106 | 121 | 14.7% |
| 1440p | 71 | 83 | 17.2% | |
| 2160p | 37 | 43 | 17.6% | |
| 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme | 1440p | 7,535 | 8,525 | 13.1% |
| 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra | 2160p | 3,944 | 4,552 | 15.4% |
Feeling the need for speed? The GTX 980 Ti was already fast, and yet it still has plenty of headroom for overclocking. Adventurous souls can almost certainly beat our moderate overclock, but the purpose here is to show what nearly every 980 Ti should be able to achieve, plus a chance to look at scaling. We’ve overclocked the core by 20 percent and the GDDR5 by 11 percent, so unless we’re CPU-limited, the scaling should fall somewhere in that range—closer to 20 percent in cases where games are shader-limited, and closer to 11 percent in games that are memory bandwidth–limited. And we get exactly that. Every game shows a 10-plus percent improvement to performance, and particularly at higher resolutions, there are many gains close to 20 percent.
| Minimum Frame Rates | ||||
| Game | Resolution | GTX 980 Ti | 980 Ti OC | Improvement |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 1080p | 135 | 161 | 19.3% |
| 1440p | 83 | 97 | 16.9% | |
| 2160p | 40 | 48 | 20.0% | |
| GTAV | 1080p | 42 | 48 | 14.1% |
| 1440p | 32 | 36 | 10.5% | |
| 2160p | 18 | 20 | 14.0% | |
| Hitman: Absolution | 1080p | 78 | 86 | 10.3% |
| 1440p | 52 | 60 | 15.4% | |
| 2160p | 26 | 30 | 15.4% | |
| Metro: Last Light | 1080p | 75 | 82 | 9.1% |
| 1440p | 55 | 64 | 15.9% | |
| 2160p | 30 | 37 | 21.5% | |
| Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor | 1080p | 78 | 86 | 11.5% |
| 1440p | 61 | 70 | 15.3% | |
| 2160p | 37 | 44 | 19.1% | |
| Tomb Raider | 1080p | 98 | 118 | 20.4% |
| 1440p | 65 | 78 | 20.9% | |
| 2160p | 33 | 40 | 21.6% | |
| Unigine | 1080p | 32 | 35 | 10.8% |
| 1440p | 28 | 31 | 13.0% | |
| 2160p | 15 | 17 | 14.7% | |
| The Witcher 3 | 1080p | 46 | 51 | 9.8% |
| 1440p | 38 | 42 | 11.4% | |
| 2160p | 20 | 21 | 5.0% | |
| Average of Eight Tests | 1080p | 73 | 83 | 14.3% |
| 1440p | 52 | 60 | 15.7% | |
| 2160p | 27 | 32 | 17.5% | |
Minimum frame rates also scale nicely, though there are cases—e.g., The Witcher 3—where we fail to see more than an 11 percent improvement. But minimum frame rates are more prone to fluctuation, so don’t read too much into one or two results. Overall, the overclock is behaving quite nicely. With a bit of fine tuning to game settings, the overclocked 980 Ti should be able to run 40-plus frames per second minimums at nearly maximum quality, even at 4K (we’d suggest dropping anti-aliasing, as it’s not as necessary at 4K). Pair it up with a 4K G-Sync display—or better yet, get the QHD 144 Hz IPS G-Sync display we talk about in our Best Gaming Displays—and you’ve got all the makings of a great gaming experience.
Are There Any Downsides?
So, what’s the cost? Good news: not very much, at least in terms of power and noise. The radiator for our overclocked CPU creates more noise than the GPU during our benchmarks, plugging along at a steady drone of 39dB from a one meter distance. Overclocking the GPU hardly matters, with a barely perceptible rise in system noise to 40dB. But rest assured, the GPU fan is working harder than before. Opening the case and putting our SPL meter an inch away from the GPU fan, we measure 63dB overclocked compared to 57dB at stock settings.
Power use tells a similar story. We measured system power draw at the wall, which was 112W when idle—not bad for a beefy hexa-core CPU with the second fastest GPU on the planet, both running overclocks! Start doing something useful and that changes, with average power draw across a collection of gaming tests measuring 380W at stock GPU clocks versus 415W with the GPU overclocked. There’s nothing concerning with those figures, and in fact, it’s really quite impressive when you look at it from a high level. We were able to improve gaming performance by upward of 15 percent and total system power draw only went up 10 percent. Here we have a 140W TDP (Thermal Design Power) CPU and a 250W TDP GPU, both running overclocked, and at the wall we’re only using 415W. With our 80 Plus Gold power supply running at around 90 percent efficiency, that means we’re not even hitting the combined rated TDP, never mind all the other components in the system.
Bottom line, then: If you’ve just picked up a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, you’re in for a treat. It's the second-fastest graphics card on the market (coming in just shy of its big brother, Titan X), but it has plenty of fuel left in the tank for overclocking. As usual, a finely tuned hot rod puts pavement between itself and a more expensive stock racer.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1JnsQ4e
