NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti Video Card Review

Overclocking the Kepler is a little more complex due in part to how GPU Boost 2.0 and the environment impacts performance.  For instance if you are running this card in a very cold room on an open test bench then the boost clock will power way past what GPUz is reporting.  Likewise running this card in a case with poor ventilation may cause the card to throttle giving you inconsistent overclocking results that won't change regardless of your frequency adjustments.

It isn’t until your baseclock exceeds the approved boost clock that your overclock will fail and until then your benchmark scores will likely never change.  Because of this you need to monitor several things.  First, the ambient air temperature, summer overclocking will be different than winter same with hot case vs cold case.  Second, watch your power target.  If you are using EVGA Precision monitor the graphs to see how much power the card is pulling.  Third, monitor the boost frequency.  If you are making changes the boost frequency will actually be higher than what is shown in GPUz.  When those increases start to diminish then you are beginning to reach the thermal limits.

For these tests we settled on a +260 frequency bump that pushed the default core speed up to 1136Mhz.  The estimated boost clock was 1188Mhz however during our benchmarking runs the actual core frequency was closer to 1280Mhz.  The power target was raised to 106% and while we actually saw the power charts hitting 106% at +110 the GPU kept scaling so we fully expect that there is still more to be extracted from this card.

Overall we have a good boost of performance across the board including in our CPU bound Crysis 2 benchmark.  Please keep in mind that overclocking is not guaranteed so your results may vary and also remember that any overclocking results you see will actually be impacted on how well the user has tuned their system and what the ambient temperature is.

For the record we did crank the fans up to 100% for these tests to ensure that excess heat wouldn't throttle our overclock.  We also want to mention that +260 is just where we stopped in our overclocking adventure.  At no point did the GTX 780 Ti indicate that it wanted to slow down so there is a very good chance that when we run this card for the HWBot team the scores will be considerably higher.