There's a reason that the GPU doesn't just ship at its highest possible overclock, though.Įvery GPU has a defined “stable baseline” that achieves the TDP, thermal, and stability targets established by the semiconductor manufacturer – that'd be nVidia or AMD, in the case of relevant gaming GPUs. “Overclocking” is specifically referring to the action of increasing the clock-rate over stock, a process that eventually requires “overvolting” to ensure stability. Now go look at a CPU with a 4.0GHz clock-rate – it's staggeringly impressive that such a small semiconductor can cycle four billion times per second.Īlthough there's a lot more at play that determines our performance – because frequency is certainly not everything – the core clock-rate is what we spend most of our time modifying when overclocking a GPU. This unit of measurement can be translated as “oscillations per second” or “cycles per second,” so a 60Hz monitor would refresh 60 times per second a 1500MHz core clock on a GPU would poll 1.5 billion times per second (1MHz = 1 million hertz).
As you all know, CPU and GPU frequencies are measured in hertz, normally in the millions or billions of hertz. I'll re-cover a few of those items before getting started.Īll microprocessors operate on a timed “clock-rate.” This clock “ticks” with regular, predictable intervals – just like a wall clock would – and does so at a frequency. We've previously written a CPU & GPU overclocking primer that explained the top-level basics of overclocking. Zotac GTX 980 Extreme review + OC / SLI benchmarks.The GTX 980 that we're using (technically, ours is branded by nVidia – they're the same, though).NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 & 970 Video Card Specsīefore getting started, these articles may interest you: This GTX 980 overclocking tutorial will walk through how to overclock nVidia's Maxwell architecture, explain power target %, voltage, memory clock, and more. We recently showed the gains yielded from high overclocks on the GTX 980 in relation to Zotac's GTX 980 Extreme and the reference card and, in some instances, the OC produced better performance than stock SLI pairing. The key aspects remain the same: Increase the clock-rate, play with voltage, increase the memory clock, and observe thermals new advancements include power target percent and its tie to TDP.
GPU overclocking changed with the release of Maxwell's updated architecture.
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