the Dark Art of overclocking so the GTX 680 is to my understanding fairly over
over overclockable but I haven't seen any numbers yet so I'm going to be using
a retail sample so this is probably going to be the only review that's up on
launch day of the GTX 680 using a retail
non handpicked board and uh we're going to see how far it goes and how well it
can compare in terms of performance to the highly overclockable
hd7970 from AMD so I've already got a
lot of my numbers prepared here uh I have my stock speed 680 results I have
my doc speed 7970 results then I have my
680 OC results still to fill in because I have not yet begun overclocking and
then I've got my 7970 OC results which are based on uh basically maxing out the
overclocking within the Catalyst Control Center so we were running at uh oh shoot
what was it just right 1.125 GHz on the
processor and then uh 6.3 GHz on the
memory so this is one freaking fast card
and I am very very excited to see what
we can get out of its main competitor the GTX
680 here you oh yeah I'll be having a right so guys I'll be having a look at
not only the performance but also the difference in power consumption from
overclocking these cards so you can see there was uh definitely an increase an
increase increase uh from the stock power consumption to the overclock power
consumption I'll also be looking at how temperatures are affected because I've
got all of my Baseline readings done so stay tuned guys we are going to be using
EVGA Precision which at launch is the only overclocking application to support
the 6 I'm more of an MSI After Burner guy
myself I love their oh yeah see it's not going to work um I love their simple
interface and I'm just very used to it I like the way they do their graphs but
since Precision is what we're using Precision is what I will have to figure
out how to how to work so stay tuned guys let's see how this goes well I
guess we better do a basic rundown of precision X first so number one is that
it has integrated voltage adjustments for the GPU so you can actually slide
these to where you want them to go
you can press set I'm not going to be changing any voltages I did not change
voltages on the 7970 so I will not be adjusting voltages on the GTX 680 for
the sake of this basic overclocking guide you guys want to turn up voltages
on your CPUs be careful in terms of your cooling be careful not to fry your GPU
because it is a very expensive mistake to make and while yes turning up
voltages may not affect it in any way this is a new graphics card on a new
manufacturing process there are no guarantees that it won't break your card
whether it's um today or tomorrow or 2 months from
now so maybe let someone else be the guinea pig Okay so we've got a
performance log frame rate target which is this kind of neat thing right here we
can enable this to set a Target FPS which is interesting because it seems to
be related to the fact that the GTX 680
dynamically scales its power consumption which is I don't know probably here
somewhere okay don't see it uh but it
scales it power consumption with its GPU clocks in order
to achieve the optimal heat output to well to stay within the uh the power
Target and heat Target that it was designed for so in order to get any
serious overclocking done you're probably going to want to adjust your power Target so I'm going to go ahead
and tell it pretty much I don't care what kind of power Target you reach as
long as we're not turning up any voltage okay so that's one thing we've also got
monitoring of temperature monitoring of fan speed this is cool you can use this
software to set up a fan curve I love
fan curves I think they're amazing I think giving users the control to say
okay yeah I'm comfortable you know with really low fan speeds up to 70 degre 70°
and then I want it to ramp right up to 100% get it cooled back down if you want
it to work that way you can totally make it work that way so I'm going to turn that off adjusting voltages aha GPU
clock offset so let's talk about GPU boost so
the basic clock here so that's at about
1 GHz 1,00 6 MHz or something like that
and then the Boost clock at 1056 or something along those lines those are
both clock speeds of your GPU
so you can you can set an offset so what
that means is the offset until it detects that it has extra TDP room extra
power room in order to uh boost itself
up from the offset that you've set so
for example if I set the offset at 100 MHz and I know this GPU is probably
going to be good for 100 MHz otherwise I wouldn't set that you should probably only go up in increments of like you
know 15 to 25 go ahead and apply that you can see those dials are hopefully
going to move in some way or unless that's just showing the uh the base
default one okay cool
interesting maybe we'll just get started and see how this
goes okay but either way that's how offsets are supposed to work so as it
needs more power it can boost itself up
and uh you're just setting up what the
base GPU clock will be and it'll Boost from there that's sort of the point okay
guys so I see how this works now while I don't recommend using furmark for any
kind of extended period of time it's been handy for me for this because it's
allowed me to uh examine how the here
with the performance log I can see the percentage of power that the board is
using please Focus there we go um compared to see we've hit 132 which is
the the maximum I was able to set for the power Target compared to what the
GPU clock is actually running at so 11:45 is what we seem to be peaking at
which is actually ah 1172 is our 100%
Peak so that's uh we should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 106 + 153 so what
is that uh or 1,6 + 153 so
1161 something like that so yeah you can see we're we're popping up there once in
a while but not staying there consistently so I'll have to look at how
performance is actually affected but it looks like the way the overclocking
works at least with Precision is that we are pretty much just overclocking the
Boost clock and I don't see a way to
adjust the base clock although because yeah obviously I can't find uh any
manual or instructions for this right now but if I it turns out that I'm wrong
then I apologize and guys please leave a comment and let me know but there we
have it so let's see what kind of a performance Improvement we get by
increasing the turbo GPU boost clock
offset on the GTX 680 well I can see
this causing some confusion so due to the way GPU boosts uh Works where it
turns up the GPU clock if it has the available power headro um if you turn
the overclocking the offset up past where it's capable of throttling to it
looks like performance does not continue to scale so you can see we have a score
of 3167 so I'm I'm going to go back to my spreadsheet now when I was at 153
offset we were able to score
3488 on the extreme preset in 3D Mark 11
however what you guys will see is 3172 so this is almost exactly the same
as what I got with my stock configuration on the GTX 680 so it looks
like once we turn it up past the threshold it doesn't necessarily scale
100% correctly now this is an early beta version of precision X and like I said I
have no instructions so I'm not even 100% sure if I'm doing it right but I'm
going to put it back at the setting I had before and run it one more time to
see if I can get my overclocked setting dialed in here so now we see an even
higher score so this is at uh plus 153
so you can see we're getting about 1250 MHz when the benchmarks are actually
running and we're seeing about a 100ish
102 119 126 so we're seeing pretty close
to the power threshold that uh that we've said over here in some strenuous
situations so let's do some real world benchmarking and find out how this
um GPU boost overclocking actually works
now I would really prefer if they made some tweaks to the to the interface here
allowing you to boost up this base clock rather than only the Boost clock so that
you have at least some idea of a baseline that you're running at uh
without it doing any like funky scaling back and forth but maybe that's
something we'll see in a future revision hard to say let's check out the real
world performance perance uh so this is weird check this out guys so with the
overclocked settings running on the GTX 680 I'm not getting that weird
flickering that I was getting in Skyrim with it at stock speed so
um yeah I don't know what to say it seems to have kind of healed itself
anyway I'm just finishing up my overclocked settings benchmarking and
I'll be done shortly so in conclusion even after overclocking both of the
cards the GTX 680 is still the winner
and once I get the hang of overclocking it it might actually be a winner by a
more substantial margin so I have a game running in the background so this shows
what my final overclock ended up being 145 this was stable in all of my gains
you can see the fluctuations in the clock speed as well as the fluctuations
in the peak power consumption according to the uh Power Target up here so um I
mean yeah I think there's probably still some refinement to be done to the
Precision X tool or whatever other tools end up becoming popular with these cards
but let's talk results for a little bit here so idle power is up about 10 watts
versus the stock clocked card and then
um idle temps are around the same 3D Mark 11 uh we saw up to
3572 3D marks um although at the same
clock speeds we saw scores as about 100
marks lower even so there seems to be some inconsistency in the scores
although we saw fairly consistent improvements across the board at
actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to um hide all this other stuff so
we saw fairly consistent improvements across the board so here is the aha so
we saw about a 7 8% Improvement in
Battlefield 3 then in crisis 2 we saw
yeah very little there so about a 4% Improvement 3 and 1/2% Improvement
something along those lines Witcher 2 we see about a you know % Improvement
something along those lines or like six or whatever that works out to uh power
consumption is a little bit higher across the board using the same
methodology I was using in my original performance review to measure that um
see this is weird Dirt 3 actually went down a little bit in terms of average
frame rate although power consumption went up substantially Batman Arkham City
is up significantly I'm probably going to have to rerun these numbers and I'll
do an annotation on my uh original review video if there's anything foul
about them because you can see that power consumption number is low that could also have to do with GPU boost
scaling back the power and scaling back the performance Skyrim we see uh NVIDIA
is definitely the king here and we see a
very moderate performance Improvement in Skyrim that is what I would consider to
be within the margin of error for this test so we didn't see much of a
performance boost there however it is still good enough to beat the radon
7970 overclocked so there you have it it
guys my GTX 680 let's call this preliminary overclocking video because I
don't think we can call these results final but this is what I've got ready
for launch and hopefully I'll be able to do a followup at some point let you guys
know if there are any changes to my overclocking methodology with this card
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