Expectations When Purchasing a Video Card - GPU Boost Investigated Part 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,274 words · ~6 min read
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for quite a while now whenever I review an NVIDIA GPU I will state right at the
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start of the video how fast the graphics card was in terms of core clock speed
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and memory clock speed and for quite a while now those numbers have really
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never been correct representations of how fast the card ran even when it
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wasn't overclocked what's to blame GPU
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boost
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the Logitech g303 features a lightweight design an advanced Optical sensor with
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Delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your
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setup click now to learn more now NVIDIA claims that their GPU Boost 2.0
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technology extracts every ounce of computing power from compatible NVIDIA
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graphics cards which results in a maximizing of frame rates in each and
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every game DM and that GPU Boost 2.0 is
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faster and more flexible than 1.0 giving users more control over its
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configuration that's what NVIDIA claims so okay but what does all that actually
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mean well the whole idea of GPU boost is
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for it to be an overclocking assistant
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what we'll be exploring today is the effects that it has on your graphics
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card when you do nothing at all um but
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it does change things if you happen to tweak settings especially voltage and
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thermal limit and Power power limit stuff like that but that's a long story
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as well and we may explore that later in a future video if you guys are
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interested so hit the like button to let me know GPU boost increases these things
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automatically by detecting if an application would be able to properly
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utilize additional graphics performance then as long as you have the additional
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headro in both thermal output and power
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draw uh you're going to be good to go for gpus to kind of do its thing
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attempting to increase your various clock speeds in order to give you the
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additional performance you can use without any intervention intervention
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from you now you're probably thinking the effects of this must be quite small
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and insignificant with graphics cards being advertised all over the place with
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their based in boost clock speeds isn't the Boost clock speed as advertised just
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what the GPU is going to boost to anyways well kind of but also totally
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not at all you'd never expect a manufactur or for that matter a retailer
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to undersell their product but what's kind of exactly Happening Here is that
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they're doing just that the Gigabyte G1 gaming 90 TI that I reviewed a while
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back you can check the video up here it had an advertised base clock speed of
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1190 with an additional advertised boost clock speed of 101 more than that which
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was 1,291 now why do I find this super
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interesting well for a few reasons to beon honest reason one is that you'll
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never really see that base clock speed anyway essentially any game will cause
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GPU boost to kick in so whatever next up
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is that super specific boost clock of
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1291 with a number that specific you'd expect it to be exactly 12291 but as we
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discovered in that video it was a massive increase of 79 MHz to an actual
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final boost clock speed of 13370 so why not aage Iz 1370 did they
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not know it would be this fast or much more likely than that were they making a
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conservative guess and this is where our
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testing began I needed a ton of the same
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GPU that all had GPU 2.0 technology and
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that's not exactly a cheap proposition to make luckily NVIDIA was already
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sending us six freaking Titan X cards only four featured here um they sent it
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our way so that we could do system upgrades for the editors and I took the
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opportunity to both build the compensator system the build of log the
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build log of which you can see here and do my testing for GPU boost the results
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were kind of awesome to be honest each
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card has its average range of core clock speeds that it would move between the
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first interesting observation here is that the lowest fluctuation on the
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lowest boosting card was still 13 MHz
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faster than the advertised boost clock speed of a Titan X from NVIDIA these are
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all referenced cards the second observation is that the highest of the
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average fluctuations was 54 MHz above
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the advertised even with every single
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Titan X hitting a thermal wall of 83° underload in conclusion I personally
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think that was damn interesting but it was a little bit disappointing that we
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ran into the exact same thermal wall on
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every single car due to the high heat producing Titan X and a reference cooler
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we could have increased our thermal limit but I want to what these cards
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would do without any changes happening to them and honestly I'm not a huge fan
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of running cards that hot anyways so no major loss there it was also interesting
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that the maximum clock speed of 1139 was
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hit by four out of the six cards for
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stage two if you guys are interested and I can get different cards I'd like to
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try this again but with better cooled cards maybe some aftermarket coolers and
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stuff but playing with some overclocking settings would be fun as well I'd like
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to explore the idea of hardcoded maximums what settings changes produce
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the biggest results automatically from GPU boost and GPU boost overclocking
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versus manual overclocking so don't forget to hit that like button if you're
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interested so I can try to acquire those additional cards speaking of stuff and
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