Gigabyte GTX 1060 Xtreme Gaming 6GB Video Card Review

Overclocking the Pascal GPU can be a frustrating process with some very surprising results.  On the surface the GPU looks to accept additional clocks extremely well until you realize that your manual baseclock might be well within the Boost 3.0 range.  Ideally the card should run at that frequency until you realize that the Boost clock has also scaled and may be outside of the operating range and be rather unpredictable.

When I say “operating range” I mean the allowable frequency.  You see, Pascal has a "hard lock" inside the chip and if you have a good one you might run around 2100Mhz and a bad one may top out at 1900Mhz. 

During my overclocking adventure I was able to get the Gigabyte GTX 1060 Xtreme Gaming to run stable at a solid 1740Mhz Core and 2340Mhz (4680Mhz) memory.  This is a 120Mhz gain over the factory overclock and around 230Mhz more than factory.  Of course the best part is when Boost 3.0 kicks in where I noticed a Boost Clock of 2138Mhz!!

This overclock was without voltage adjustment and would actually peak around 2190Mhz which is very impressive.

Despite the rather impressive overclock there is very little gain when looking at the benchmark results.  This can be attributed to a couple of factors.  The first is NVidia Boost 3.0 and the fact that my card was boosting up to 1900Mhz on stock clocks helped close the gap.  Raising those clocks 230Mhz should have shown a higher gain however, the speed difference wasn’t much compared to the base clock.  The second factor is increased memory bandwidth.  You will have noticed that all of the Futuremark scores scaled about the same while the game didn’t move much at all

That is just how the programs use the available memory bandwidth in which case core frequency doesn't have much impact.

Keep in mind that overclocking is not guaranteed so your results may vary.